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In other words, supernodes are nodes connected behind a routable IP with a minimum of bandwidth. They are used to provide NAT traversal for unroutable clients.
by iwwr 16y ago
In other words, supernodes are nodes connected behind a routable IP with a minimum of bandwidth. They are used to provide NAT traversal for unroutable clients.
I can imagine ipv6 would greatly benefit Skype.
- ZoFreX 16y agoIt's not just to solve the NAT problem. There are no servers in the traditional sense, it's a "cloud" of peer-to-peer clients (that are also, strictly speaking, servers), and you need some way of "bootstrapping" yourself into that cloud when you sign in. Supernodes fix this problem easily, but I have to wonder why it was a relatively short list hardcoded into the client... it wouldn't be hard to make it a bit more adaptable.
- bdonlan 16y agoPerhaps the problem is that it was, in fact, adaptable, meaning that if all the supernodes your client knows about go down you're no longer able to bootstrap. In fact, I found I was able to reconnect faster after the outage by deleting the shared.xml file that stores known supernodes - presumably connecting back to Skype-operated bootstrap servers.