[Psi-devel] Data Transfer Proxies

[Wolfgang Illmeyer]

Am Montag, 29. Mai 2006 17:05 schrieb Mircea Bardac:
> Hi everybody.
>
> I remembered today an idea I had some time ago, but never got to the point
> of actually asking people to comment on it.
>
> What do you think about including a list of data transfer proxies within
> Psi, so that, transparently, when a direct connection fails, a proxy from a
> known list would be chosen?

> Note: as far as I know Gajim already does this.

If you do that, please make sure, there is a UI way to turn the proxy list 
off.
In Gajim, you have to fiddle around with gconf-edit (or something like that) 
if you want to edit the list. There's no user visible option to generally 
turn off the use of proxies either.
This is a problem, because AFAIK in the JEP there's no way to tell the other 
side about a preferred endpoint (like direct connection), so the other side 
choses some random endpoint, which is most likely a proxy.
This drives a lot of unneccessary extra traffic through the proxies and 
therefore possibly slows them down.
Also, the speed of the file transfer is probably suboptimal, because a direct 
connection would be way faster in many cases.
Lastly, I think this is also a privacy issue - If I don't need a proxy, I 
don't want third-party proxies to be able to sniff my files.

One of my contacts uses Gajim on a regular basis, and we've been wondering for 
a long time why the filetransfers are suddenly so slow, and in the end we 
came across the issue when one of the proxies went down - because file 
transfer just stopped working although we had a direct route. Neither me nor 
my contact using Gajim knew about the proxy list and it was a very lengthy 
and annoying process of finding out how to disable it in Gajim. He instantly 
filed a bug about it and AFAIK they're already working on a way to improve 
the situation.

/Wolfgang