NAT, firewall, et alia issues

Perhaps something can be learned by studying
Ray Ozzie's Groove groupware system.

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/p2p/2000/10/24/ozzie_interview.html
writes in part:

Ray Ozzie, creator of Lotus Notes, founded <http://www.groove.net/>Groove 
Networks in 1997 to take
groupware in a new direction. His new product, Groove, enables groups of
collaborators to form in a decentralized, ad-hoc, administrator-less fashion,
within or across corporate or other firewall/NAT-governed realms...

Jon [Udell]: Groove's adaptive communications layer ensures that the 
product will
always work, configuration-free, even behind firewalls and NATs. How does 
it do that?

Ray [Ozzie]: The product's communications layer is quite sophisticated. 
Without going
into agonizing detail, it has the capability of dynamically sensing what 
communication
adapters or interfaces are active at any given time. For each, it 
understands the
dynamic performance characteristics at any given time, and what obstacles are
between it and the open Internet such as NATs and firewalls. Furthermore, 
it can
do protocol adaptation, using a variety of things such as UDP, a specialized
compressed multiplexing protocol over TCP/IP, or HTTP, as necessary. It even
has the capability of throttling its own use of communications resources, 
so that
it doesn't unnecessarily interfere with foreground browser activity.

How does it do that? It's a mere matter of code.

end of quote
RF 


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