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Comment by javitury | Hacker News Reader

First, make sure that you have enabled upnp and nat-pmp on your router and that your machine firewall allows both. The distributed design of ring makes finding peers slow, from 1 to 20 min. Regarding the issues, this is what I've encountered:

1) Text chat works unreliably. Sometimes messages are not delivered even if the other peer was found.

2) Even if upnp and nat-pmp are both working, sometimes you need to open all tcp and udp ports to get ring working.

3) Migration of accounts to ring beta 2 on linux was a total dissaster. It always failed so I had to create a new account.

4) On some computers during a videocall ring makes pulseaudio crash and freeze the system.

Ring has a lot of potential but it's still not ready to replace skype. It works better than qtox though.

EDIT: It was ring beta 2, not ring 2

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Hey, thanks for the response. Upnp is no problem, but my router has no settings for nat-pmp. It does not matter, unreliable chat messages are a dealbreaker, and the same goes for not getting messages sent while the client was offline, as described in a comment above.

I also do not run pulseaudio, if that is a requirement (and it looked like it back then when I looked at it) the linux-client is useless to me.

> I also do not run pulseaudio

Pulseaudio is not a requirement, ring can choose ALSA if you prefer.

> but my router has no settings for nat-pmp

Maybe I exagerated a bit. Ring comes by default configured to use TURN and you can also setup STUN. The problem with this is that they are not distributed.

If you want true P2P, you have to use upnp or nat-pmp, Ring can use any of the two. I don't know if it is because I get impatient, but it takes forever to connect. Just upnp should suffice but I get paranoid and think, maybe it's upnp that is not working. Then I enable nat-pmp in the router and open the nat-pmp port in the laptop. Sometimes I get so impatient that I also open (temporarily) every port in the laptop just in case.

> Pulseaudio is not a requirement, ring can choose ALSA if you prefer.

That's great to know :)

I'll keep an eye on Ring. Something like this in a working state would be great, But it should not take forever to connect and should be stable (more or less). According to this thread the project still has a lot to do, and it might be that the p2p approach is just not a good one for the problem at hand. Riot/Matrix looked more promising in that regard.

upnp, nat-pmp, open ports… what if I'm behind cgNAT without any ability to receive incoming connections whatsoever? Does it just not work? :D

You can use STUN or TURN (default). But then it's not truly P2P.

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