Well as alluded to by Bill and later confirmed by myself I have been working on a workaround for the RPA CGNAT issue. I've had a ball getting the workaround up to this stage (but for the wrong reason; forced unpaid leave from work due to serious downturn caused by do-gooders so lot's of time to fill).
Anyway, the workaround is at stage where I believe the software is stable enough for others to test with. I've tested here quite successfully and without issue but there are things I just can't test myself, mainly I don't know if the workaround will work on 64bit versions of Windows, or any of the later versions of Windows for that matter.
As with everything there is a list of pros and cons to the workaround. I'll start with the cons:
- It will be slow. Not only are you going to contend with how slow Rings servers are anyway you'll also have to contend with your communication with Rings server having to go halfway around the world and back. This will add time. It may make communication so slow that RPA thinks it can't communicate with the server. That shouldn't happen though.
- Only one person at a time can use the proxy. This is due to the combination of how Rings server works with it's fixed source port and the fact that I only have one IP address to use for the proxy.
- When someone else is using the proxy I can't use RPA myself to download from Ring's server (see above point).
- There is probably bugs I haven't found and fixed yet.
Pros:
- If you have very cool freinds or very understanding relatives who are not CGNAT'ed you could set a copy of the proxy up at their place, all you'd need is a Raspberry Pi and a copy of the proxy code*
The software was only supposed to be proof of concept of the various parts of the software and then I was going to code it in a more modern framework. I got carried away and kept on going in the old framework I was programming in. If the softwware works I probably won't redo it in the modern framework.
If anyone, CGNAT issue or not would like to test the workaround let me know and I'll let you know by PM where to download the workaround software from.
- Tim
* your technical ability on setting up a Raspberry Pi and configuring port forwarding in your friends or relatives router would be the limiting factor
