maceman.info » Personal

Idea for VoIP program

MaceMan — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 23:16:51 +0000

My idea of a dream VoIP program would have a lot in common with popular VoIP programs. Server-side presence information, firewall transversal, video, etc. I’d like a program that degrades gracefully. Popular programs try, but it seems that transmitting video can interfere with graceful degradation. Also, the lower limit on bandwidth and jitter is too high for my preference with many of these programs. I’d like a program that could transmit video and audio in conditions as low as dial-up. I’d like it to have an auto-reconnect preference to resist connection drops. I’d like a quality setting to allow the user to throttle their bandwidth usage. Maybe I’ll start a project like this someday. One can dream, eh?

Recap of my dream VoIP program:

Text chat
Low-latency audio
Video
Group chat, group audio, and group video calls
Free internet-to-internet calls
Robust back-end network
Peer-to-peer for most operations (increases efficiency)
Firewall transversal, when necessary
File transfers
Username-based identification. No confusing IPs or ports to work with
Optional offline LAN-only mode
Graceful quality degradation
Audio and video usable in dial-up or GPRS conditions
User-configurable quality setting
Optional auto-reconnection for dropped calls
Silent reconnection. The program stays hidden when it’s not called by the user. No pop-ups saying “THE NETWORK CONNECTION WAS LOST”.
Extreme resilience to packet loss and jitter. I’d like audio to work in 50-80% packet loss. Maybe some extreme forward error correction would do the job.

Eddie “fixes” his guitar

MaceMan — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 19:17:59 +0000

GameSurge proxy G-Line

MaceMan — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 07:44:51 +0000

Today I tried to log onto the GameSurge IRC server to get a scrim for Counter-Strike. When I logged on, however, I was greeted with a one hour G-Line (Global ban) for having an open proxy server. I have a web server but no proxy server.

Closing Link: MaceMan by ClanShells.DE.EU.GameSurge.net (G-lined (AUTO [1 hour] Unsecured HTTP proxy, please fix your web proxy configuration to fix this or see http://www.gamesurge.net/cms/Proxy%20G-lines/ for more information.))

I quickly became frustrated. I waited an hour and tried again with WireShark, a packet sniffer, running. I learned that the proxy scan that GameSurge was doing was sending the CONNECT command, the command for proxying (normal web pages use GET). On apache, I have all the proxy server modules disabled, and I wasn’t running any other proxy servers. The weird part is that my web server was treating it as a GET request and responded with a HTTP 200 OK message. This caused GameSurge to think I had a proxy server running and G-Lined me. I don’t think this is standard behavior for web servers, and it seems to be a compatibility quirk (maybe related to dynamic pages, maybe not). I discovered a workaround that you can put at the bottom of your httpd.conf file to fix this.

Order allow,deny Deny from all