public address communicates to a private address over the internet problem - networking

now i am running a network available bandwidth project.Suppose i am testing the available bandwidth between my machine and planet1.scs.stanford.edu.
Now the problem i am faced with is that my machine is using a private address,say,172.18.186.200,the other end is using a public address,say 171.66.3.181.Once i ran the test,the receiver end(the remote machine assumed) could not receive ACK from the sender end(my local machine).
i know my publicly routed address, i guess it is about the NAT.So how to correctly specify my local address to successfully carry out the testing project ?
Thanks in advance !

The usual form of NAT (masquerading) doesn't allow inbound connections. To allow them, you would need to add another form of NAT, port redirection, which in common ADSL routers tends to be called "Port Forwarding", "Virtual Servers", or something similar. This way, you tell your ADSL routers to forward connections to its port X to some internal IP on port Y.
(Some protocols use several connections, e.g: FTP, H.323, and send the information about secondary connections on the primary connection. These protocols need special support in the NAT device).

Related

Port forwarding with private IP

I use a static IP connection, Configured to TPLINK router.
I have a local server running which i can access from my network, but i want it to be accessed outside network.
So I did port forwarding. and its Successfully running.
Now the problem is :: The IP address of my WAN is also a private address like 10.10.X.X, so when am entering http://10.10.X.X, i can access my site, but not outside my network. Please guide me how to fix this?
If your WAN address is a private address, your ISP is using CGN. This is becoming more common since the RIRs have, or soon will, run out of public IP addresses to assign to ISPs. It sounds like your ISP has run out of public addresses and needs to use private addresses for its residential customers, reserving its remaining public addresses for its business customers which are willing to pay for public addresses.
Basically, your ISP is using NAT, too. You would need to have the ISP forward your port on its NAT router, but the odds of that are zero since it probably has a policy you agreed to to not host servers on your residential LAN (buried in the fine print of the ISP agreement). This situation will play out more and more over time.
You have to use the "Virtual Server" settings. Port triggering is used for.
Once the modem router is configured, the operation is as follows: 1. A local host makes an outgoing connection to an external host using a destination port number defined in the Trigger Port field. 2. The modem router records this connection, opens the incoming port or ports associated with this entry in the Port Triggering table, and associates them with the local host. 3. When necessary, the external host will be able to connect to the local host using one of the ports defined in the Incoming Ports field.
It is not used for incoming connections which are triggered from outside!
Of course, to have it working you have to have an application listening on that port not only having the firewall on Windows allowing the port.
After you set up the "Virtual Server" a port scanner should show you the port is open (even without having a running application listening) - it will try to port forward it. I use ShieldsUp for testing.

When is port forwarding necessary?

I've been investigating networking for use in a two-player game I'm writing, and I'm still not clear on when a device must have a port forwarded in order to communicate with the outside world.
From what I've seen in other games, port forwarding is always required in order to host a server, but is not required on the client. In addition, there are other situations, such as skype (which, to my understanding is ultimately client to client), where neither end must forward a port.
So my question is, in over-the-Internet communication, when is and isn't port forwarding necessary, and what steps can i take as a developer to make it so my users don't have to worry about it? Thanks in advance!
Port forwarding is needed when a machine on the Internet needs to initiate a connection to a machine that's behind a firewall or NAT router. If the connection is initiated by the machine behind the firewall, the firewall/router automatically recognizes the reply traffic and sends it to the machine that opened the connection.
But if a packet arrives on the external interface, and it's not a part of such a connection, the router needs to know what to do with it. By default, it will reject it. But if forwarding is configured for the port, that tells it what internal machine to send it to.
Put another way: you need port forwarding if you want to run a server behind the NAT firewall/router, you don't need it if you're just running a client.
There is reason why Skype don't (not always) need manual setting of port forwarding:
When you install Skype, a port above 1024 is chosen at random as the
port for incoming connections. You can configure Skype to use a
different port for incoming connections if you wish, but if you do,
you must open the alternative port manually.
If the port chosen for incoming connections becomes unavailable, by
default ports 80 and 443 will be used as alternatives. If another
application (such as Apache HTTP server or IIS) uses these ports, you
can either configure the application to use other ports, or you can
configure Skype to not use these ports.
Port forwarding is must if you host a server.
You can use same technique as Skype...
I am not sure if there is any other option...
Port forwarding (occurs) when a NAT, firewall or some other device blocks communication on all or some ports.
To answer your question as an example, most commercial routers use NAT to allow multiple people to use the same IP(As view from the outside world) provided by ISPs. Most ISP's use NAT to allow multiple customers to use the same IP(As viewed from the outside world). To get this to work, the NAT changes the internal IP and the port number of a communication to THE(there is only one for the entire sub network) external IP and a new port number. By doing this, the router/isp/ect can tell which internal IP and port each external communication goes to.
Anytime one of the computers communicating over the internet are behind a NAT, port forwarding is required. I'm sure there are way more situations than this, and the solution to each can be quite complicated. But this covers the vast majority.

if I have a local ipv4 address can I use it from outside a network to talk across a NAT

I have an application where I want a device inside a network behind a NAT to make a call to the public network giving a server its local address, Later, say 10 or 20 minutes later, I'd like the server to be able to contact the device inside the network.
Is there any protocol generally supported by firewalls/routers etc. that would direct me to the local node if I provided its actual current local address?
Thanks
No, there is no such protocol. Moreover, in the case of multiple NAT, the local node can only know its address behind the innermost NAT, and the server can only know the public address outside the outermost NAT, so you have no means of mapping through multiple NATs, or even knowing how many exist in the path.
The local node will have to initiate and maintain an open connection with the server if it wants to receive anything from the server.
No there is not a protocol for mapping the IP address, though you can use portmapping/port forwarding to map specific a port to an IP Address
This is the sort of thing UPNP is meant to solve. Note that there are still challenges -- the network equipment needs to support it and the feature needs to be enabled. Many network admins will not enable it for good reason.

how to redirect connections to IPs behind the NAT to NATted (public ) IPs at the source?

I have an application that relies on IP addresses for communication (Domain names simply does not work. :(... )
Its function is to connect to its peer on the other machine and send data over after establishing trust. During the "trust establishing" phase they both exchange their IPs for future communication. They both are behind the two different firewalls and are NATted. One is in our NATted office network and other is in the cloud NATted behind their firewall. The applications knows their respective private IPs and exchange that (the 10.x.xxx.xxx range), when they try to connect back to each other (using the private IPs with range 10.x.xxx.xxx) for transferring data they fail. The connection is TCP and the port range is pretty varied.
I am curious if there is anyway I can hard code (for this one time) a rule (at may be firewall level or some place outside my application) that says if there is a connection being initiated for IP address 10.x.xxx.xxx then redirect it to 205.x.xxx.xxx?
Private IP address ranges like 10.x.y.z are, by their very nature, private.
You can't do any meaningful resolution unless each node in between the endpoints has rules in place to translate these.
Translation is tricky, all the main tools you would use cater for static translation (port forwarding, e.g. where a particular port is forwarded to a particular IP). This is one avenue, but it is a hacky one (it requires you to open lots of ports, procedurally update your router and probably have some sort of broker server to maintain mappings).
Alternatively, you could run the isolated networks over a VPN, which would give your endpoints mutual private IPs which you can use to connect to eachother. It would simply be a case of binding to this new address and communicating across the VPN. This would also potentially encrypt your communication over the internet.
Other possibilities are to use NAT/TCP punchthrough techniques which can allow traversal, but these are really a patch to a broken network topology (Read up on IPv6 to see how this can be alleviated).
Alternatively, you could route all the connections over a proxy, but this will complicate matters compared to a VPN.
To answer the question about hardcoding a rule, port forwarding is the solution here. It will obviously depend on your router configuration for the peer accepting the connection, but this client should have the port target port forwarded to the machine. This will obviously not scale very well and is really shifting to a server/client architecture for one connection!
Depending on your hardware, you may be able to forward a range of ports (if a single port cannot be established) and limit the port forwarding to certain incoming connections (the external IPs).
Information on port forwarding can be found at http://portforward.com/
This sounds a lot like what you'd want out of a VPN. Is there anyway that you could set one up? Basically the Site-To-Site VPN between you and the cloud would say 'oh hey, here is an ip located on the remote network, go ahead and connect through the link'. Would this kind of solution work in your case?
Something along these lines: http://i.msdn.microsoft.com/dynimg/IC589512.jpg

Windows 7 does not accept broadcasts from ip address 0.0.0.1

we have little network devices which are shipped with IP address 0.0.0.1 to ensure that they never collide with any other device in their new environment (thus none of the 10.x.x.x, 172.16.x.x or 192.168.x.x ranges) until configuration. DHCP is no solution since there might be no DHCP server in the field.
The devices would listen to UDP broadcasts and answer with broadcasts until they are given their new IP address this way.
This worked fine with Windows XP - but sucks with Windows 7: the config program does not receive the answer packets from the devices which still have 0.0.0.1. Wireshark sees the packets, then they are dumped by the system.
Question: Is there any reason (RFC?) that actually prohibits using this address in a local environment? Or is it just MS that was overcautious? Where can I read why they treat this address "invalid"? Which ranges are really "invalid" now, too?
Any idea of a workaround on the PC side (Win 7)?
I know that it is not recommended to use 0.xxx addresses for work places, but for this very reason - having a not-used address - it works perfectly.
Edit: there is a device out there called "Netburner" which might have faced the similar issue, according to their forum. See: http://forum.embeddedethernet.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=612&p=2198 Does - by coincidence - anybody know some background information?
It sounds as if your configuration application is listening for broadcast packets on all network interfaces and expecting to receive packets from foreign subnets.
That should not work - the OS should only pass-on broadcast packets from the subnets each network interface is on, not from all subnets on the same physical (e.g. Ethernet) segment. I am reasonably certain that doing otherwise is broken behaviour WRT the IP protocol.
The are two ways to deal with this:
Make sure that your network interface has an IP address in the target subnet. You can have more than one IP addresses for each network card, so that should not interfere with normal network operations.
Configure or modify you application to use raw sockets, like Wireshark. Keep in mind, however, that this overrides all normal checks and balances and should be avoided, since it can cause behaviour that is almost impossible to diagnose - which is why it is frowned upon by meny network administrators.
Can you you add new routing table entries to Windows machines easily? Windows has to know which interface to use when routing a broadcast packet to the 0.0.0.x network.
The Unix machines I'm familiar with have a routing table that maps network/netmask entries to either gateways or interfaces (if the network is a local network). The local network (192.168.0.0/16 for my home network) gets sent to interface eth0. Everything else 0.0.0.0/0 gets sent to a specific gateway machine 192.168.0.1.
If my machine sent a UDP broadcast message to network 0.0.0.0/24 (in other words, UDP broadcast sent to 0.0.0.255, then my machine would forward the packet to the gateway machine (which it can look up via arp). The switches in the middle wouldn't propagate the packet to other network devices, because the MAC address is set.
If my machine had another routing entry for 0.0.0.0/24 to the local interface, then my machine would send the packet on the wire using an ethernet broadcast group, and the switches would forward the packet to all connections. (Yay! Just like hubs in the 90s! :)
So I figure you need to add a routing entry for 0.0.0.0/24 to your client machines, so that they can properly address the broadcast packet.

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