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:
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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.
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Significantly lower the required bandwidth when in DHT mode. If Internet connection is limited in bandwidth the whole DHT feature is not working properly.
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Add LAN peer discovery support Peers can send IP multicast/broadcast packets to identify each other and hence skip the DHT lookup at all.