Dear List We are a tiny business running in China. In China ISP competition is not very healthy, 2 major ISPs: China Telcom, China Netcom both defend their own business by limiting network access to other ISP.
We have an office in Beijing, in Beijing there is only one ISP company (monoplay business) that is China Netcom so they "choose" to use it. We have an office in Xiamen, in Xiamen there is only one ISP company (monoplay business) that is China Telcom, so we "choose" to use it. We also have a server hosted by a hosting company, that company is very smart, using some very special technology to connect both ISP. Transfer data from our Xiamen Office to Beijing => 3 ~ 10 KB/s, no connection can maintain 10 minutes. Transfer data from Beijing to Xiamen is the same slow. In Xiamen, transfer data from / to our server is 100KB/s; in Beijing exactly the same. We used to use skype, but quality isn't very high nor very realiable because only a few super-nodes have fast access to both ISP. Besides we got a few other problems too related to skype / gizmo. I am thinking perhaps it's not difficult to set up some software on the server that do the "routing", e.g. it serve as a call center that both office login to a VOIP software and it connects to the server, the server talk to both sides. This is the fastest solution and it should work. That's only my imagination, I am still searching for such software. Both offices use OpenSuSE as desktop computer and the server runs Gentoo Linux. Both offices are behind each one's NAT firewall. Any suggestions on a VOIP solution for our office? P.S. Certainly THIS would work: set up VPN on the server and both office dial into the VPN before they start to use some SIP software. This can solve the problem, but I think it's over complicated. Besides, I never tried VPN on Linux, only did it on Windows: on windows the downside is once a host has dialed up VPN, local network connection is "hidden" for it, that I can no longer access the hosts in the same office that has not yet dialed in the same VPN. This is not acceptable for us. -- Zhang Weiwu Real Softservice http://www.realss.com +86 592 2091112 -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
