[libnice] Force an external address (srflx) candidate?

[Olivier Crête]

Hi,

I think there are 2 things we could do.

1. We can add a new API like:
nice_agent_add_local_address_with_external(agent,internal_addr,
external_address)

This API would let libnice know about such forwarded addresses. We can
then expose it to the peer as a host candidate with the external
address. And internally libnice could use it as a normal host
candidate.

If you know for sure that the machine is not behind an unexpected NAT
(ie, it's a server). Then you would not longer need to set a STUN or
TURN server on that machine and you should be able to only have host
candidates so the gathering should be instant.

2. We already have nice_agent_add_local_address() for the application
to select internal addresses to use. As you know, if this API is not
use, we just gather the addresses of all interfaces. I wonder if it
wouldn't be a good idea to have a property to restrict the automatic
gathering to only the default interface. That will reduce the number of
candidates and it should make operations faster.

Olivier


On Thu, 2020-10-15 at 11:30 +0200, Juan Navarro wrote:
> Thanks for your comments; however I believe this would indeed fall into
> the category of feature request, because after looking at all the docs
> and even checking a bit of the code, it's not apparent to me that this
> possibility is offered.
> 
> 
> On 14/10/20 23:22, Stuart Marshall wrote:
> > Juan, to further answer your question: we’re using libnice for our
> > server. However, I had to upgrade the libnice to a private build from
> > the tip of libnice master. The default libnice on Ubuntu 18.04 had a
> > bunch of bugs that prevented ICE negotiation from working well. The
> > latest libnice seems to work well (albeit a bit slowly), but you may
> > not be able to use the standard ones that come with your distro. I
> > haven’t checked the version of libnice in Ubuntu 20.04. I think it was
> > updated, but not sure if it has all the recent(ish) bugfixes.
> > 
> 
> Yeah we also build our own binaries, to stay on top of latest fixes, to
> generate GStreamer bindings for our fork of GStreamer, but also to add
> the "G_DISABLE_ASSERT" flag, which disables assertions in runtime
> (otherwise when libnice find a bug and goes to a wrong state, it will
> make the whole process crash; I get it's a good method for testing and
> finding bugs, but not for production where a crash is the last thing you
> want to happen)
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-- 
Olivier Crête
olivier.crete at collabora.com