[145663] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: How Skype uses the network [was: News item: Blackberry services
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Alex Brooks)
Sat Oct 15 09:19:40 2011
In-Reply-To: <AB07788A-A060-48F0-BC27-9A0F69DB4921@ianai.net>
From: Alex Brooks <askoorb+nanog@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 15 Oct 2011 14:17:54 +0100
To: nanog <nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
Howdy,
On Fri, Oct 14, 2011 at 8:11 PM, Patrick W. Gilmore <patrick@ianai.net> wro=
te:
>
> On Oct 13, 2011, at 7:26 PM, Matthew Kaufman wrote:
> > On 10/13/11 3:30 PM, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:
> >> In fact, Skype, just as a for instance, is worse on hotel wifi as laun=
ching the app on a laptop makes you a middle node for some conversations.
> >
> > Per the Skype IT administrator guide, a Skype node will not become a su=
pernode unless it has a public IP address and meets the memory, bandwidth, =
and uptime requirements. It will not become a relay node unless it has a pu=
blic IP address and is directly reachable from the Internet.
> >
> > It is very unlikely that launching the Skype app on a laptop on hotel w=
i-fi would meet these requirements.
>
> In the last 5 seconds, without touching Skype or having any active voice =
or chat sessions open, my computer has had communication with 14 IP address=
es. =A0Here is a sample of some:
For "IT administrators" (which probably qualifies most people on this
list) there is a=A0detailed=A026 page guide to how Skype communicates on a
network, when you may become a supernode, and how to configure the
program (including to never become a supernode) using GPO (registry
switches) or XML files at
http://download.skype.com/share/business/guides/skype-it-administrators-gui=
de.pdf.
There is a summary of the Supernodes section (concentrating on how to
stop supernodes happening if you have no control of the=A0client) at
http://www.skype.com/intl/en-us/security/universities/.
Anybody who might end up with Skyoe clients on their network might
want to give it a gander, as it has some useful info on things like
network impact (along with a lot of stuff that nobody cares about and
you can skip).
HTH,
Alex
