Off the wall idea: Count the number of hops to determine locality
By Stefan Constantinescu on Monday, January 1st, 2007 at 4:28 PM PST In Ideas and rants
My rant pertaining to my lust for the death of the PC suite presented itself with a small problem.
I want to be able to access and modify any of the data stored on my phone over a web browser. What would basically happen is you take your phone, run an application, let’s call it "Net Mode" and it turns on a mobile web server allowing real time access to your data. This application pings a gateway server to establish a solid, hopefully encrypted, IP connection, which then lets you access a website, where a user must authenticate, giving you total control of your device.
Here is my issue: What happens if the connection is on my LAN? As in I’m at home, laptop connected to my router via wifi and so is my E61. Do you really want your data bouncing from your E61 to a server in Finland back to you? Then it hit me … count the number of hops between both devices. If it only takes one hop from the IP address of my ThinkPad to the IP of my E61 then the gateway server would tell the site hosted at Nokia (NYSE: NOK) to use the local (192.168.1.XXX) IP addresses of my devices instead of the external (70.247.189.XXX) ones. Not only does it reduce latency but it increases throughput.
I really need a white board and a board room to clearly explain this, I know I’m going to make quite a few people raise their eyebrows trying to figure out what I’m trying to explain here.
There are other “nat traversal” techniques that could be used here to determine if the phone and the computer are behind the same NAT. That’s how it works in SIP land anyway.
E61 is running the webserver on all Interfaces (GPRS/WLAN/WHATEVER), but you select which connection type to use (the same you do with your E61 Browser). Then E61 should update a dyndns account, so you type the dyndns address on your PC. When the E61 is in your WLAN, then you can use the LAN IP. Something wrong?
“This application pings a gateway server to establish a solid, hopefully encrypted, IP connection,…” a device does not have to ping anything to establish a connection in a network. There are services running that allows establishing a connection to it (the E61 in this case).
Yea I need to read up on it more, I’m not a networking expert.
I just wish playing around with Apache would be easier.