[Scottish] Linux videophones

[Colin McKinnon]

On Sunday 01 June 2003 15:30, Jim Jarvie wrote:
> Try Gnu Gatekeeper (www.gnugk.org).
>

Aha - last time I looked around for such a thing, openH323 was still in early 
stage of development - but I see the GnuGK is at least aware of NAT. I don't 
think I need a full blown gatekeeper yet though. Still I shall investigate 
more.

> Alternatively, you can set up a FreeSWAN tunnel (www.freeswan.org) and
> treat the remote site as an extension of your network (hence no need to
> worry about NAT).
>

Yes - the downside is the increase in latency; I got a measurable difference 
using stunnel to encrypt traffic on a specific TCP connection (no tunneling - 
just data encryption) for non real-time data - this is only going to get 
worse adding tunneling into the mix (for those pesky UDP packets). En face it 
would seem to be an elegant solution to the problem though. Thinks. Maybe I 
could use netcat+pppd / similar to setup a tunnel without any encryption 
overhead (or is FreeSWAN already capable of this?).

> Video over a modem is painful - broadband is much better.  If a move to

Currently, the slow end is talking at 128Kbps both ways. I'm not expecting 
much more than blurry postage stamps, although having said that I was 
surprised how well vc worked point-to-point over an ISDN-2 line (Sony unit 
using ???? as network protocol). Its more likely I'll need to think about 
bandwidth throttling.
 
> Finally, www.fdns.net would allow you to set up your own DNS records or
> even your own sub-domain of fdns.net
>
Excellent idea!

Thanks for the pointers & URLs Jim.

Colin