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by icebraining 4424 days ago
Sorry for skepticism, but I'd say it's certainly a better to invest the same money in making the same RPi (or alike device(s)) globally-addressable and accessible from the Internet.

That's a nice idea, but unless you control the network - and if you're deploying devices for other people, you probably don't - it's just not feasible. You'll have layers of NAT and firewalls preventing it.
2 comments
jamesbritt 4424 days ago
Sure, but wouldn't it be better to reduce those when possible, rather than adding another one, especially yet another under the control of a third party?
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icebraining 4424 days ago
On the whole, yes, but that's not realistic if you're a developer and you want to deploy some devices. You can't just expect people to rearrange their whole networks for you.
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drdaeman 4423 days ago
This certainly was an issue in early days of P2P, but I thought it was already solved for good.

Doesn't P2P works nearly literally everywhere nowadays and aren't there loads of NAT-piercing and/or tunneling libraries that Just Work™? (Well, possibly, unless put behind some truly abysmal corporate firewalls where even plain outgoing HTTP isn't working all the time — but that would be another story.)

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ianawilson 4423 days ago
Indeed, NAT-piercing isn't new or even revolutionary. It's a small feature of our mission to make building IoT apps as painless and fast as possible.

Our main goal is to build an ecosystem of ready-to-use devices and a RESTful API around this ecosystem so devs can focus on building their awesome IoT application, rather than bothering with the infrastructure. This is a component of that effort.

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icebraining 4423 days ago
I don't think NAT piercing works if both of the endpoints are behind NAT, which might happen in this case (e.g. RaspPi + controller app on smartphone).

You could run a server in the middle; but that's exactly what this is.

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drdaeman 4421 days ago
> I don't think NAT piercing works if both of the endpoints are behind NAT

It does, in many cases even without on any third party. That is a (mostly) solved issue for at least 5 years or maybe even more. Here are examples of such tools: http://samy.pl/chownat/ and http://samy.pl/pwnat/

There are cases such tricks won't work (like overly conscious connection tracking engine and all ICMP traffic blocked - but without ICMP one would have PMTU issues and those ain't fun), but there're always STUN and TURN. The distinction is, those is not middleman, but just a NAT piercing helpers. They don't pass your traffic through and they're generic and useable with any service.

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