Ok, I'm faced with a difficult task. I've never
seen a piece of hardware that can provide a solution like, nor do I believe I
could afford a piece of hardware solution to do this, so where do I turn, Linux
(-:
We have many employee's that travel a great deal,
they visit many remote locations in Asian, and Eastern Europe. I've found the
the number of hops from Asia and Eastern Europe is quite rediculusly high. In
order to save costs we'd like to start using Video Conferencing from these
locations. Now this is unforchunately very difficult as the number of hops back
to North America is so high. The best solution seems to be to create a
Forwarding Router. The idea is that, I'd place a *forwarding router* at a fast
colo in asia (PSI Net for example). PSI net has services in Asia connected to
many asian networks, with a private network back to North america (3
hops).
So if I placed a box in Asia with PSI net that were
to accept connections as though it were the end point, but instead it would
forward all packets via PSI Net's private network back to North America, there
by cutting the number of hops in half, and greatly incressing the connection
rate back to north america.
The ways I've figure out how to implement this
are:
Accept Connection on Eth0
Modify Client IP and Destination IP of the
packets,
Send packets with Modified CIP and DIP's to North
America
( CIP = FORWARDING GATEWAY, DIP = NORTH AMERICA
CONNECTION)
The end in North America would then reply
back,
the Forwarding Gateway would then modify the CIP
and DIP to = the real client
and boom
I've also considered using GRE tunneling, though
this solution means 2x the hardware (box in asia, box in north america) And alot
of video conferencing data is UDP in nature, so this would probably slow things
down a bit.
I believe that I'd probably have to use the 2.4
Kernel series for the advanced package management seen with IPTables. But I'm
not quite sure were to start.. (p.s. because it's video conference, it can NOT
be PORT specific, it has to be Packet forwarding, not socket)
Any ideas would be greatly
appreciated.
Michael McConnell
michael@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
