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Net Meeting and NAT

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by 28

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An employee and I were testing Net Meeting last week before we implement it at our company, from different locations. I was in New York. She was in two different New Jersey locations. Each time it did not work, said "party cannot accept calls."

My New York office has a firewall and I have not opened the Net Meeting ports so we cannot receive incoming calls. I called two New Jersey locations that do not have a real firewall but do have built-in firewall in the routers.

Because we are not using a directory server, I do not want to be out there like that. See I was calling her IP address, but it is NAT, so it did not work.

Anybody have a way around this?

(maybe IP address forwarding? do something to the router)

I do not want to use a directory server but several offices have NAT which does not work with Net Meeting.

5 replies

by some guy in seattle

To add to Anna's reference, note that the article says "establish OUTBOUND connections through a firewall."

The NM software uses IP information from the application layer to try to connect to another NM machine. This means that anybody using NATwill have the IP modified at layer three to an internet address but the data (IP) in layer seven will remain the same. This traffic will get to the remote site but the other machine will then respond back to the source machine with the IP it sees in the application data (the private address). Unless you can find out your internet address and email/phone/ICQ/IRC this to your intended destination you are out of luck. There are lots of tools that will let you find out your internet address, theShields Up scanner at Steve Gibson's site (grc.com) will tell you, for instance.

However, if your firewall/router is using Port Address Translation, that's a double whammy because using PAT you cannot get an inbound connection even if you do findout your internet IP.

To use it with any effectiveness in both directions, you will need to have an internet-legal address that is not modified by NAT or PAT and a lot of bandwidth (particularly for video).

NM's a neat toy, but difficult to use unless it has all it's requirements satisfied.

Sorry it's not more positive, but I spent a lot of time working to get acceptable performance and simplicity of use out of NM but was only partially successful due to the limitations built in to NM.

Hope that helps -

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