Re: (#511) find a netbios host

On Sat, Nov 01, 2003 at 06:44:53PM +0100, Speak Freely Forum wrote:
> Hello,
> I am just a user of Speakfre. My experience with
> Speakfre disagrees so far with what John Walker,
> its author, says in his "Bye Bye Speakfre" about
> NAT. My Zyxel 642ME (13) with NAT works well with
> a few other PCs on the net (with or without NAT).
> The problem is 'finding' each-other. Ok send via
> email but that isn't very practical although it
> IS mostly by manual method that I update/distri-
> bute my changing IP addresses for now. An excep-
> tion is when I'm so lucky that the lwl let me
> find and connect to the other Speakfre-PC.
> 
> Why can't I find a named netbios host on the In-
> ternet just as I can on the LAN ? ?

My understanding of windows networking isn't so complete, but netbios
relies on being able to broadcast through the network in order to
discover hosts.  I don't see how that could work for the complete
internet.  Thats what DNS and tcp/udp are for. 

The simplest way of initiating conversations is to use an instant
messaging system, like jabber, and have one party quote the IP adress
to the other.  That can just be a 10-finger interface, giving your
current address.

That's more complicated in the case of both parties being behind a
NAT.  In that case both users need to know the public address of the
other's NAT firewall.  Doing that in an automated fashion really
requires access to server somewhere that will get the session going.

Thomas has been talking about using Jabber for session initiation,
which sounds good as there are well maintained public servers that can
be used.  The problem is that I don't know if it is possible to get a
jabber server to tell you what it thinks your own address is (ie: your
firewall address that it receives your packets from).  If it is
possible, then you can get that information, and send it on to the
other party via jabber, and start the speakfreely session.

Soren

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