Port forwarding information

[Roger Hale]

Hello,

I am excited about the possibilities with SonoBus.

I am on a university network, but am coming up with the message:

"Could not connect with user, one or both of you may need to configure your internal firewall or network router to allow SonoBus to work between you. See Help documentation to enable port forwarding on your router."

I am wondering where I might find "Help Documentation" as mentioned in this message.

Best,

Roger

[Marc Ainger]

Unfortunately, my experience is that many university networks will not allow peer to peer communications such as Sonobus. 

[Jesse Chappell]

Sorry about that, unfortunately the kinds of firewalls that institutions have are not friendly with peer-to-peer networking (using symmetric NAT), and you as a user inside them just don't have the ability to do anything about it on your own unless you have an in with the network administrators.

However, you can still get it to work sometimes if all the users you are connecting to are *outside* the institution on a regular home internet connection that they have access to configure their own router. In that case here is the technique to tell them to set up port forwarding for SonoBus, which might magically allow it to work with them:

In SonoBus settings under Options, check the Use Specific UDP port, and choose any number you want (12000 for this example). Then in your internet router's administration control panel, set up a port forwarding for UDP for port 12000 and direct it to the internal network address of your machine's port 12000. Often this is enough for one person behind an institutional symmetric NAT to connect with someone who isn't.

In the future, there may be a non-peer-to-peer server based version of SonoBus that will let anyone connect to anyone, at the expense of routing all traffic through an internet server, more like music101 or jacktrip in server hub-mode, jamulus, etc.

Jesse

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[Michael Dessen]

Hi Jesse -

Can you clarify a bit more on this for me? (I'm familiar with port forwarding both at home and at my university to run jacktrip servers, etc., but not clear on using sonobus between institutions and home networks):

If the machine behind the institutional firewall has port forwarding setup on a static IP, then would that mean that the home network users on the same call would not have to open ports?

If so, and the institutional user sets the port in options, what if there are more than 2 people on the call? (Wouldn't there need to be a port per peer?)

No rush! Thanks.

[Dan Hulme]

Hi Everybody - Jesse, this software seems excellent - thank you for developing. 🙂

I am also on a university network (Oxford Uni), but do have support from the IT networks team to find a solution for student rehearsal. What would need to happen to enable P2P on an institutional network? Or is it just not feasible at scale?

best, Dan

[Jesse Chappell]

Comments inline: 

On Tue, Oct 27, 2020 at 2:03 AM Michael Dessen <mde...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Jesse -

Can you clarify a bit more on this for me? (I'm familiar with port forwarding both at home and at my university to run jacktrip servers, etc., but not clear on using sonobus between institutions and home networks):

If the machine behind the institutional firewall has port forwarding setup on a static IP, then would that mean that the home network users on the same call would not have to open ports?

If that institutional machine does indeed have the port forwarding set up as I described below, then correct, the home network user shouldn't have to do anything special. My comment was that it is still sometimes possible to get it working even if the institutional firewall end was NOT set up for forwarding, but if the home network user IS.

 

If so, and the institutional user sets the port in options, what if there are more than 2 people on the call? (Wouldn't there need to be a port per peer?)

No, SonoBus (via AOO) uses a single UDP port for all peer communication, it's cool that way :)

 

Jesse

 

No rush! Thanks.

On Monday, October 26, 2020 at 7:34:39 PM UTC-7 jesse wrote:

Sorry about that, unfortunately the kinds of firewalls that institutions have are not friendly with peer-to-peer networking (using symmetric NAT), and you as a user inside them just don't have the ability to do anything about it on your own unless you have an in with the network administrators.

However, you can still get it to work sometimes if all the users you are connecting to are *outside* the institution on a regular home internet connection that they have access to configure their own router. In that case here is the technique to tell them to set up port forwarding for SonoBus, which might magically allow it to work with them:

In SonoBus settings under Options, check the Use Specific UDP port, and choose any number you want (12000 for this example). Then in your internet router's administration control panel, set up a port forwarding for UDP for port 12000 and direct it to the internal network address of your machine's port 12000. Often this is enough for one person behind an institutional symmetric NAT to connect with someone who isn't.

In the future, there may be a non-peer-to-peer server based version of SonoBus that will let anyone connect to anyone, at the expense of routing all traffic through an internet server, more like music101 or jacktrip in server hub-mode, jamulus, etc.

Jesse

On Mon, Oct 26, 2020 at 10:21 PM Marc Ainger <aing...@osu.edu> wrote:

Unfortunately, my experience is that many university networks will not allow peer to peer communications such as Sonobus. 

On Monday, October 26, 2020 at 6:35:53 PM UTC-4 d003...@dixie.edu wrote:

Hello,

I am excited about the possibilities with SonoBus.

I am on a university network, but am coming up with the message:

"Could not connect with user, one or both of you may need to configure your internal firewall or network router to allow SonoBus to work between you. See Help documentation to enable port forwarding on your router."

I am wondering where I might find "Help Documentation" as mentioned in this message.

Best,

Roger

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[Hans Leeuw]

Hi, did anyone have any success in specific settings for a university network to make it possible to use sonobus? There is more and more interest in the kinds of opportunities that sonobus offers but University networks are rigid. Are there any people working at a University that can use Sonobus and can these people share any knowledge about the specific network setup that is used at their institution? A separate network? Or other solutions?

Thanks for listening.

Best, Hans. 

Op zondag 1 november 2020 om 05:52:03 UTC+1 schreef jesse:

[Michael Dessen]

Hi everyone. Jesse did give some tech specifics above in response to the original post, but to answer Hans and add a bit more in case it helps:

First, if you get the error message the original poster listed, you might try just quitting and reconnecting. I know that sounds weird but in fact the other day, I got that same error with a friend who was on a different univ. network (and I was on my univ. network) and I couldn't understand why it had happened, because we'd connected before without problem from the same 2 networks. I think it was some kind of glitch, because when he dropped and returned it was fine.

For Hans, I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to do but as Jesse suggests above, you can set a specific port for Sonobus to use, and if you do this it should work IF you've also enabled UDP port forwarding on that port number. To do that at most universities, you need to contact your Network Administrator. I have a section in this doc on that which is old and chaotic now but here's the main part for people working at institutions, in case it helps: (it refers to jacktrip because that's what this was initially about but the same concept applies to any app requiring port forwarding):

---

Unless you're at a rare campus that does not have a firewall in place for ethernet networks, you’ll need to work with your Network Administrator to open ports. They will usually need to know the building in which you plan to use the computer (since this determines the network), and typically there are 2 different methods they can use to help you.

One method is for them to 1) assign a static IP to your computer or ethernet adapter (associated with its MAC ethernet address) so that each time it is connected to the ethernet network, it is assigned that IP; and 2) to simultaneously assign that IP an exception on the network so that your computer can receive on specific port(s). The advantage of this method is that you don't ever need to manually configure an IP, as long as you're using that machine (or adapter) on that network. It does require that you give the correct MAC ethernet address for your computer or ethernet adapter to your Network Administrator, so they can properly set up the entries in their system.

As another option, they can provide you with a static IP that you could configure manually on that network, and then, just as with the second part of option 1 above, they would associate that IP with the port exception. This way, they don't need anything from you at first (i.e. you never need to give them a MAC ethernet address). This method has the huge advantage that it can be used on any machine. For example, in a class where multiple students all need to use JackTrip, this method is far easier to manage than establishing requests for all the students’ MAC ethernet addresses. However, the  downside of this method is that each user has to manually configure an IP for each session (though manually configured IPs can of course be saved in most computer’s network settings, to make it easier after the first time).

I'd recommend requesting the first method if there is a particular computer that you know you'll be using regularly for JackTrip, and the second method if you will be using JackTrip on different machines.

---

I'm not a network admin, just a musician, but this is my advice from years of hassling with jacktrip on campuses. I haven't actually had any issues using Sonobus on my univ. network yet, but if you do, then specifying ports (after using steps like these to open them) might work. Make friends with your network admins - you'll need them! Good luck,

Michael