At 03:50 PM 6/9/97 -0700, Justin W. Newton wrote:

At 04:24 PM 6/9/97 GMT, William Allen Simpson wrote:

...

Speaking as the designer of the network portion of a couple of those popular games, the applications are _not_ broken. Sending the IP addresses is the only working method to dynamically join and redirect multiplayer games.

This is getting off-topic, but is there any reason that src address in the packet header doesn't work? Most (yes, all, I'm being silly) packets have the src address set in the header, and it seems as if it would be a reliable way to determine the uniqueness of a stream, seeing as that is how this strange proprietary protocol named IP does it. What am I missing?

In the cases he is referring to addresses are passed at the application level from the client initiating the call. For example, here is a list of popular programs that pass addressing information at that level: ftp cuseeme irc real audio quake NAT can break these applications and special handling must be done to make them work.

Justin W. Newton Senior Network Architect Priori Networks http://www.priori.net ISP/C, Director at Large http://www.ispc.org

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