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Hey, this must have come up before, but my search-fu is too weak to find a previous discussion.

Are there plans to add to the hub the ability to forward packets between pilots?

I can see two reasons, why we would want that:

• JoinFS could fall back on this mode, if it notices that peers cannot contact each other directly, because of network/firewall/router issues,
• to protect the IP addresses of privacy-minded pilots, not from the hub owner, but from other pilots; I'm thinking especially about Twitch streamers here.

On the hub side, it would have to be configurable (permit/forbid, probably default to forbid),
on the client side, it would be nice to be able to configure the user's preference: "only connect to hubs with forwarding and hide my address", "if hub offers forwarding, request it; if not, connect without forwarding", and "don't care"

Cheers,
Marc

Hi Marc,

JoinFS already does this but it is completely automated. Any failure of connection between any two clients will result in an alternative route being found via another client.

I like your idea of configuring the hub/client to control this. By configuring a hub to force all clients to redirect via the hub, it would effectively become a client-server model instead of peer-to-peer. Interesting idea.

I'll add it to the new feature list, although finding the time to implement it is another thing. Having said that, it mostly requires changes to the UI as the network code is already there to do this.

Peter

That is better news than I dared to expect, thank you very much! If I understand correctly, that change might even be backwards compatible, because the protocol doesn't need to change?