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Created by Iurii Voitenko@iuriivoitenko

LAN users fail to discover each other

With true loyalty to distributed p2p communications, it's a real embarrassment to require high speed Internet connection for Ring when used in LAN. Consider the following setup: a private 10.x.x.x LAN network with very strict firewall rules and proxies for Internet connection needs a p2p messenger for chat, VoIP and presence. Moreover, this LAN has just 56K for Internet and about 10M throughput for Intranet. I considered Ring as a major candidate for this task, but I was really frustrated when Ring required the whole bunch of Internet IPs to discover nodes sitting in the same LAN! Hence, improvement suggestions:

  1. Add static IP support. Yes, sometimes it's much better to simply assign IP address to a contact than allow DHT lookup running for minutes and fail.

  2. Significantly lower the required bandwidth when in DHT mode. If Internet connection is limited in bandwidth the whole DHT feature is not working properly.

  3. Add LAN peer discovery support Peers can send IP multicast/broadcast packets to identify each other and hence skip the DHT lookup at all.