On Thursday 01 February 2007 15:05, Frank Pineau wrote: > When I travel on business, I like to set up video chat to talk to my > family at home. The problem is, home is behind a NAT firewall (a PIX to > be exact). I have limited IP addresses and cannot spare one to > statically assign to an endpoint inside my network for this purpose. > Regardless, I'd like to be able to connect to any node in my network, > depending on who I want to call. I never know what I'm going to be > behind, but it's usually also some sort of NAT firewall that I do not > control. I've tried ekiga (nee Gnome Meeting), and a few others with > almost no luck. I thought something like skype (which doesn't support > video under linux) or an instant messenger that uses an intermediary > server (Yahoo, ICQ, etc.) to get around the NAT issues but none of those > support video either. I've tried VPN to my PIX, but as I can't control > where I'm coming from, I haven't been able to configure a reliable VPN > client for linux. > Much depends on your router. The NetGear that I bought recently does allow a service to be made available to more than one end-point box. I believe that it's what is called a 'stateful inspection firewall'. I've not tried it out, so I don't know whether the initialisation would have to be from the home box, though. Without that, it would be necessary to change port-forwarding settings each time a new user was required - obviously not a good idea for your situation. aMSN is quite good in serving video, but there is no voice chat yet - it's in the pipeline. You see the other person, but have to type your messages. I've used it with a windows msn user at the other end, without any problems, too. > In short, when trying to video conference under linux, I'm successful > around 5% of the time. It's almost always easier to boot into Windows > and do it from there. What do you use for mobile video chat and how > have you set it up? I used to use GnomeMeeting with h.323 and that worked very well. I think ekiga's move to sip, while good in the long run, introduces more complications. Sadly, I don't have a friend using ekiga that I can test it with, but I believe the people do get very good results. Things are far from perfect, but improving all the time. Anne
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