Imagine Romeo and Juliet are under house arrest by their families. The families don’t allow any phone calls through either, unless it’s from a number Romeo or Juliet had just called out to. So while Romeo or Juliet can call anyone, a call from Romeo to Juliet will be blocked by her family as it’s not in response to a call she had just made. Similarly a call from Juliet to Romeo will be blocked by his family as it’s not in response to a call he made. The two lovers are thus unable to talk to each other, what are they to do? <\/p>\n
Here’s one thing they could do. If Juliet were to call Romeo somehow<\/em> and he were to call her back, then the call would get through. The problem is when Juliet calls Romeo her call is discarded by his family and so there’s no way for Romeo to know she has called him and if he were to call back now it will be let through. But suppose they had a common friend willing to help them, could that make a difference? <\/p>\n What Romeo and Juliet could do is call this mutual friend and not hang up. When Juliet wants to call Romeo she’ll inform the mutual friend who will pass this news on to Romeo. (A nice twist here is that Romeo and Juliet could use burner phones. When they call the mutual friend they’ll pass on their current phone number to the friend who will pass it on to each other. This way the families have no idea what Romeo or Juliet’s current phone numbers are and they can’t block calls to these numbers!). Juliet will then call Romeo’s number. The call will be discarded by Romeo’s family as it is not in response to a call he made, but Juliet’s family does not know that and as far as they are concerned Juliet has just called Romeo and no one answered. Since Romeo knows Juliet will be calling him and getting blocked, he can now call Juliet and his call will be let through as her family thinks its in response to her previous call. The two lovers can thus talk to each other! Happy days! <\/p>\n What I have described here is what’s known as hole punching<\/a> in Computer networks. The difference being instead of Romeo, Juliet, and their families, you have computers behind firewalls or NAT (Network Address Translation) routers. The computers behind the firewall or NAT are unable to accept incoming packets from the outside world. They can only accept replies to packets they have sent out. To get two such computers talking to each other we need to “punch a hole” in the firewalls. That is, have a third computer somewhere on the Internet that will co-ordinate between them and help with the initial discovery and connection (if any of the computers are behind NATs it is akin to Romeo or Juliet using a burner phone). This third computer doesn’t have to do much except help with the initial phase. And worst case, if the hole punching does not work for any reason, the third computer can act as a “relay” passing packets from one computer to the other. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Imagine Romeo and Juliet are under house arrest by their families. The families don’t allow any phone calls through either, unless it’s from a number Romeo or Juliet had just called out to. So while Romeo or Juliet can call anyone, a call from Romeo to Juliet will be blocked by her family as it’s … Continue reading Romeo & Juliet go hole punching!<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[196],"tags":[59,202],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rakhesh.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1153"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rakhesh.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rakhesh.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rakhesh.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rakhesh.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1153"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rakhesh.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1153\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rakhesh.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rakhesh.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rakhesh.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}