Skype Crashes and Burns In Worldwide Outage 347
Stoobalou writes "VoIP and instant messaging service Skype has disappeared from the Internet, nary a fortnight after Microsoft snaffled up the outfit in a $8.5 billion deal."
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Skype Crashes and Burns In Worldwide Outage
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Is everybody really that stupid? (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft is not running Skype yet. It takes months for these deals to go through. And TFA suggests that Skype has never gone down before, which is BS. 'Disappeared from the Internet'? Seriously?
The only useful thing in this submission is that I learned the word 'snaffled.'
Re:Is everybody really that stupid? (Score:5, Informative)
Even worse, the article says www.skype.com is unavailable. I just went there and it loaded up instantly and completely. Pretty sure the whole thing's bullshit, just someone with an axe to grind.
Re:Is everybody really that stupid? (Score:5, Interesting)
Or a routing issue that only affects some customers. Or a geographic load-balance issue where people from a certain area are seeing a broken site.
(It's working for me from NYC area at the moment.)
Re: (Score:2)
(It's working for me from NYC area at the moment.)
Michigan, Florida, and Kentucky here. No problems.
Re:Is everybody really that stupid? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
"The only useful thing in this submission is that I learned the word 'snaffled.'"
Damnit, and on the one day in the month that I don't have mod points!
Re:Is everybody really that stupid? (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft is not running Skype yet. It takes months for these deals to go through. And TFA suggests that Skype has never gone down before, which is BS. 'Disappeared from the Internet'? Seriously?
The only useful thing in this submission is that I learned the word 'snaffled.'
It's a safe assumption that the word snaffled derives from the early Latin acronym, snafu, which translates: Situation Normal All Fucked Up.
Re: (Score:2)
There's also the whole "Skype is working just fine" angle we can use to call this article crap.
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I learned the word 'snaffled.'
I'm not even sure that they used it correctly. The common term over here is "snarfed". I think "snaffled" is a Brit thing.
haters gonna hate (Score:3, Informative)
I confess to having run Internet publications using Skype as an instant messaging service for over seven years now.
In all that time the service has never once failed - until today.
So you don't remember December's outage, do you? Haters gonna hate.
Re: (Score:2)
No, ad-hom only applies when you're doing that as a point -- for example, "You're a hater, therefore you're wrong."
If you break this down into a syllogism, it's, "You claim the service never failed until today. It failed in December. Therefore, you are wrong." Childish? Maybe, but it's logical, regardless of adding a "haters" comment afterwards.
works in NYC (Score:3)
maybe this is a european thing?
Re:works in NYC (Score:5, Informative)
It was an XML glitch, corrupting the config.xml and/or shared.xml files, which are locally stored. They need to be removed manually, since a reinstall won't touch them. Anyway, this led to a surge of traffic to skype.com, the predictable /. effect and a lot of FUD.
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A bit short on factual information. (Score:2)
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I agree Skype has failed many times in the past. This is just a temporary problem or has Sony's IT admins now joined Skype?
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And it's even more ridiculous when Microsoft hasn't even acquired Skype yet since they are still awaiting FTC approval. The article writer is a FUDster.
Like father like son (Score:3, Funny)
So Skype is already adopting MS's reliability
Re:Like father like son (Score:4, Informative)
Man, I'm so tired of hearing this. I have shops with Solairis, Linux and Windows and you know what uptimes are damn close. Solaris still wins out over Linux and Windows in the uptime department but this lame MS beating is just getting too old.
Maybe you should go beat on Google for the holes in Android app security?
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in a server environment every server OS should be able to handle an easy 2+ weeks of uptime without even the slightest issues.
However, in a desktop environment windows OS (in comparison to linux) can barely handle 2 weeks of uptime without a guarantee that a driver will have an issue when waking from sleep, or that a driver will become unresponsive spontaneously and corrupt itself until said service related to the driver is restarted.
In short, microsoft's problem is not MS, but how they interface with third
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Good point.
I think the only way to fix the quality issues you describe would be by opening the code.
When will MS figure that out?
Often, companies like MS have too much on their plate and if you let your clients participate in fixing problems, you make them feel they belong. MS is still trying to do that but their approach is hamstrings them.
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There's an extra 'is' there, sorry
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2+ weeks? Outside of patching I have servers that see up-times measured in months and years depending on application. Insofar as the desktop is concerned I have shops with Linux and Windows Desktops. In the XP environment, yes, it's still a BSOD world but with the Windows 7 Desktops they are substantially better. I wasn't trying to get into a "MS is better than Linux" discussion, I was trying to point out that this old MS bashing is just that, old news.
I don't see mainstream businesses rushing out to bu
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Exactly. And this is not limited to servers. At home I had for years an XP box, a Linux box and a Mac. Guess which one needed to restart more often? The Mac. My windows and linux machines have uptimes measured in months (well, I would do the reboot suggested by XP update once every 2 months or so - so Linux went on much longer), while my Mac would require a reboot on average once a week. Sometimes it was some problem, and sometimes it was a reboot requiring (and not simply recommending) OS update that I HAD
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Nice to hear someone saying this. People here keep trotting out ancient bugs from the 98 days or outright untruths. A few weeks back someone posted about how an x64 OS crashes because it tried to install an x86 driver... Right, yeah, Windows is that stupid. Not sure how the driver was signed with the x64 certificate needed before it will install at all, let alone passed the simple version checks, but those are a minor details when we are talking about the evil borg hive mind that is Microsoft and its leader
Re:Like father like son (Score:5, Insightful)
Many of us lived through the hardships of a conversion from UNIX to Windows and it has not been pretty. I'm reminded of how Microsoft themselves has quite the difficulty converting Hotmail from UNIX to Windows. It's been said it took about 2x the hardware to finally get Hotmail running on Windows instead of UNIX. You don't shake that off unless you're either a newbie, a fanboi, or both.
LoB
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Sorry, I call BS on uptimes. While a barebones MS File/Print Server can run for MONTHS without a glitch, adding any number of other Microsoft Server products (SQL) will require frequent reboots.We have one server that requires, yes requires, reboots at least twice a week because of SQL memory leaks. Giving it more RAM (from 4 to 8 GB) only delays the problem, from daily to twice a week.
On the otherhand, we have Linux box that has never needed a reboot except when we updated the kernel. It is running LAMP an
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I was originally going to go with a bit about how Skype's management held a meeting to figure out how to let MS know they were ready to join MS's products and felt they needed to do something to illustrate that but the setup on that joke was too long, as you can tell.
Re: (Score:2)
http://slashdot.org/story/07/08/20/150258/Skype-Blames-Microsoft-Patch-Tuesday-for-Outage [slashdot.org]
cunt.
Peat. And repeat. (Score:2)
Isn't this the second time Skype went down? Wonder if it's the same cause: blogs.skype.com/en/2010/12/cio_update.html (CIO update: Post-mortem on the Skype outage)
Like Sony, I thought they would have fixed this problem by now, but guess not.
Don't think it's because of Microsoft (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
you never know, the guy responsible for watching the blinking light on the server might have read all the news of the takeover, exclaimed "I'm never working for Microsoft" and walked out. And right now, everyone's looking at the servers, scratching their heads and saying "where's the guy who usually resets this thing?".
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The acquisition is so recent, I don't think anybody other than high ranked executives could have put their nose in Skype business, so I don't think Microsoft developpers could have caused such a mess.
What acquisition? Microsoft is still awaiting FTC approval before anything can actually happen. Microsoft only AGREED to acquire Skype at this point.
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The acquisition *hasn't happened yet*.
Just to be crystal clear. Buying a company is a LONG process. A company that size, it could *easily* be a year or more.
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I don't think Microsoft developers could have caused such a mess
Another possibility is that some skype sysadmin was teetering on the brink of hysterical depression at the looming prospect of answering to The Beast. It's not as if religious sentiment is unheard of in matters technological. Consider the Pope of Cupertino or emacs/vi.
It must be a sweet mental shortcut to filter the world through condign causation. There's a fairly active brain center for doling out the blue juice which rarely considers second order effects. That's for other brain regions to consider
Say again? (Score:5, Informative)
Been connected to Skype, and chatting, all day. No issues. www.skype.com working just fine.
With statements like "has disappeared from the Internet" and "worldwide outage", I would expect to have... you know.. have noticed something?
So, let's rephrase TFS to something more like: "Some users/areas experiencing issues reaching Skype servers and services"
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So, let's rephrase TFS to something more like: "Some guy with a blog that hates Microsoft is experiencing issues reaching Skype servers and services and then submitted a link to Slashdot because Slashdot hates Microsoft. And Apple. And has issues with Linux. Y'know what, slashdot hates everything to do with computers."
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Your rephrase doesn't properly convey the overly anti-Microsoft sentiment that is immune to facts!
(website) Works on my machine. (Score:2)
It redirects to http://www.skype.com/intl/nl/home [skype.com]
Featuring the "Works on My Machine" certificate. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/03/the-works-on-my-machine-certification-program.html [codinghorror.com]
I'd really want to use Skype, but its no use as nobody i knows does so. Vendor lockout!?
Luckely here, the Dutch government has ruled that Dutch telecom companies may NOT charge extra for using instant messaging (or similar) apps on their network.
Its a mess right now, but its likely a free (possibly opensource) alternative
Stop whining... (Score:5, Informative)
Step 1: Uninstall Skype
Step 2: Go to %AppData%\Skype\YourUsername rename config.xml to config.bak
Step 3: Go to %AppData%\Skype rename shared.xml to shared.bak
Step 4: Reinstall Skype
Step 5: Profit!
Re:Stop whining... (Score:5, Informative)
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Oh well, this is how I've done it and since it works... I figured I shouldn't skip any steps.
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Don't need to uninstall/reinstall. Just stop skype (well, it's probably already crashed if this is happening to you), delete the shared.xml, and restart it.
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Step 1: Uninstall Skype
Step 2: Go to %AppData%\Skype\YourUsername rename config.xml to config.bak
Step 3: Go to %AppData%\Skype rename shared.xml to shared.bak
Step 4: Reinstall Skype
Step 5: Profit!
If I gotta do a complete reinstall* to fix a problem I didn't cause, I think I'd reserve the right to whine while doing it. That's like saying: "Quitjer bitchin' and just re-install windows!"
*And now it looks like maybe I don't need to.
window dressing (Score:2)
I strongly believe that the investment firm running Skype has kept it alive and looking healthy for as long as necessary.
Now the deal with Microsoft is made, there is no reason to keep the extra staff on board to keep it running without issues.
This also explains the sudden pull out from Astrix support.
This is the world we live in when money driven firms keep the windows clean, until it is no longer necessary.
The correct term is window dressing.
Microsoft, good luck with your recent purchase.
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I strongly believe that the investment firm running Skype has kept it alive and looking healthy for as long as necessary. Now the deal with Microsoft is made, there is no reason to keep the extra staff on board to keep it running without issues. This also explains the sudden pull out from Astrix support.
This is the world we live in when money driven firms keep the windows clean, until it is no longer necessary. The correct term is window dressing.
Microsoft, good luck with your recent purchase.
I would hope (correctly or incorrectly) that Microsoft would insist, in writing, that the current owners properly maintain the systems throughout the acquisition process. Dammit, Jim, I'm an engineer not an MBA, but that still seems like a reasonable course of action -- you know, like specifying that the current owners don't trash the house you've contracted to buy from them in between inspection and closing.
One idiot user is a worldwide outage? (Score:3)
And I'm certain I've seen a skype outage story at slashdot in the past.
That explains something... (Score:2)
They pushed an update yesterday (Score:2)
Seriously... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's supposed to be "News For Nerds", just report actual fucking facts related to science or tech, and not anti-MS bullshit or what color muffin Steve Jobs had for breakfast!
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Agreed. And as much as people here like to rail against the idiots on Digg, at least their site has a mechanism to bury dumbass stories like this.
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/. needs a "vote spam" flag for articles.
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I think the editors need to go on a basic journalism course because they clearly have no idea how to present a story with as little bias as possible, or even how to do the most basic of fact checking.
Seriously, do they do anything other than make up the stupid "department" tag and click "submit to front page"?
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Unfortunately, /. has been the Fox News of the tech world for a decade now.
I think the real problem is that readers who weren't around even prior to having user accounts don't remember that it was just a site for collecting links by a bunch of friends on the Internet. Those same non-editors are still the ones tossing stories on there.
The issue is more that /. presents their employees as editors when, for 15 years, they have not been editors. While there is news to be had on /., you'll get more out of it rea
Really ? (Score:2)
It's working fine for me in Northern Virginia at 9:33 AM EDT - Cox Cable.
Skype works for me. (Score:2)
Skype is still functioning for me.
"nary a fortnight after Microsoft snaffled up..." (Score:2)
it's good to see shakespeare still employed and writing story summaries on the internet
but he could do with less colorful opinionated superlatives and just relate the facts
kdawson? Is that you? (Score:5, Insightful)
2) Inaccurate, inflammatory headline.
3) Short, information-free stub.
Sure seems like him.
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I'm beginning to think there are really only 1 or 2 people working at /. and they just user different names to try and keep the heat off them..
it might just be kdawson left at this point because there is no way there could be anyone else there and they let him anywhere near a keyboard unattended.
Re: (Score:2)
1) Poorly researched, out of date information.
2) Inaccurate, inflammatory headline.
) Short, information-free stub.
4) Which draws moths to the flames for the better part of day before being corrected. Got to get those page hits.
Re:kdawson? Is that you? (Score:4, Funny)
Instead of writing silly blogs... (Score:2)
... maybe take the time to check system status :
http://heartbeat.skype.com/ [skype.com]
and/or read published solution:
https://support.skype.com/en/faq/FA10874/I-m-having-problems-with-Skype-today?frompage=category [skype.com]
Embrace, Extend... Crash-n-Burn? (Score:2)
This would be a first for Microsoft. Anyway, some alternatives to Skype.
http://www.pamil-visions.net/skype-down/221825/ [pamil-visions.net]
Absolute rubbish (Score:2)
1) Skype is working fine for a lot of people except, apparently, the author.
2) Skype's web page loads fine
3) The author seems to have missed previous Skype outages
4) How the fuck does this FUD make the front page of slashdot? The article is pure libel.
Not a big MS fan here... (Score:2)
...but the mindless MS bashing really gets old.
Posting nonsense like this diminishes the credibility of /., especially when it comes to MS-related topics. If this site is to be taken seriously when it posts valid criticisms of MS -- and I agree that there are many! -- BS stories like this need to stop.
Can we change the headline of this article to (Score:2)
Humor... (Score:2)
Re:Hotmail all over again (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, you know, it could just be a server issue. If you look, and ask Skype users, the outage is already over.
I know, not as fun as MS-bashing, but the best bashing is based on fact.
Re:Hotmail all over again (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah but now all skype calls start with the windows 95 startup sound.....
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LoB
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Anyone remember when Microsoft back in 2007 released an update to Windows that took out Skype's servers? Flooded Skype's servers for several days.
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there was a huge outage a couple months ago...
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Skype was down for a while last December for millions of users
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/12/22/skype-down-for-millions-of-users [wsj.com]
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And the fact is that Skype has run flawlessly for at least seven years (according to the article) without a hiccup
Well if that's what the article is saying it's lying:
On 16 August 2007, Skype became unavailable to a majority of its users. Millions of users were requesting to log-in at the same time following a routine Windows update and this flooded the peer-to-peer system. The event lasted for about two days.
On 22 December 2010, it was reported that Skype experienced an outage estimated to represent 8 million foregone calls.
and as soon as M$ gets it, they break it.
Except for the fact that Microsoft hasn't even acquired it yet? It takes far more than 16 days for an acquisition to go through.
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Or, you know, it could just be a server issue. If you look, and ask Skype users, the outage is already over.
I know, not as fun as MS-bashing, but the best bashing is based on fact.
And the fact is that Skype has run flawlessly for at least seven years (according to the article) without a hiccup and as soon as M$ gets it, they break it.
There you go, an off the cuff, fact based, M$ bash.
No, it isn't (as there have been several outages in the past). Facts are a bitch for the fools who talk about them without checking them out, don't you think? The thing that gets me the most is this thing you said:
as soon as M$ gets it, they break it.
Correlation does not mean causation. Turn in your geek card at the door if you please.
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It is impossible since the acquisition hasn't even happened yet. They haven't even gotten regulatory approval yet. If you truly think that such a huge acquisition like this happens in 16 days then you're an idiot.
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Pretty much, yes. There's no way Microsoft tried to switch Skype to Windows servers right now. They don't even have possession of the company yet. The Hotmail switch was planned for months before the attempt was even made, no one is stupid enough to try a massive OS switch on an infrastructure network, with less than a month of planning time, before the deal is even final. MS has done dumb things in it's history, but they're no where near that stupid.
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Even if we accept that Microsoft is exercising some level of control over Skype (an event I'd consider highly unlikely this early into the process, but believe what you want), there's still no way they'd be performing a major infrastructure change like a full OS changeover this quickly. I doubt you could get the code ported this quickly, let alone get it tested, a deployment plan written, everyone read into the plan, etc, etc. This isn't like replacing the OS on your home PC. We're talking hundreds or th
Re: (Score:2)
Because the following scenario is, of course, impossible: 1. Microsoft tries to switch the current Skype servers with Microsoft servers 2. The whole thing bursts into flames 3. They put the previous Skype servers back online
possible =/= probable. And certainly this: (possible -> likely) is not a tautology.
What do you think is more likely? That Skype suffered another (yes, another) blow out that just happened to occur after its recent acquision by MS? Or that MS immediately engaged in the IT-OPs nightmare of changing the OS and infrastructure and rolled it out into production with only a mere weeks of acquiring Skype?
Seriously, Occam's razor bitches. Pls turn your geek card at the door and thanks for playing.
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Who wants to bet that Microsoft tried to replace the OS of the Skype servers with Windows?
Look at me, I read Slashdot's headlines, I'm well informed on anything Microsoft!
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Skype has central servers, which is what they are referring to. In fact, does anyone know if Skype even is peer-to-peer, rather than a peerserverpeer model?
Re:Hotmail all over again (Score:5, Informative)
The only central servers are for authentication. All the communication traffic is peer-to-peer, though sometimes it will go through a third peer to overcome networking issues.
There are also supernodes (sometimes skype owned) where many users connect to send and retrieve connection data (who's on, search, etc). A simple network traffic analyzer can confirm much of this.
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Skype uses some nodes as super-nodes, but it's otherwise mostly peer-to-peer. There are landline gateways across the planet, but they're not easily termed as servers.
The Microsoft haters in TFA need some education. Skype hasn't yet been officially acquired by Microsoft, and has had many kinds of outages. A global carrier can't help but to have them occasionally for many different reasons, but Skype wasn't out across the planet. Somebody couldn't connect and thought that Skype was down when some others could
Re: (Score:3)
And here's another theory based on nothing, a mass exodus of geeks from Skype who don't want to work for Microsoft either left or decided key parts of an update weren't in their best interest in botheri
Re:Whoops (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Why is this modded down? Google, is that you?
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Re:Whoops (Score:4, Informative)
Mod parent up.
For what? Being completely wrong? Skype is peer-to-peer.
Unlike other VoIP services, Skype is a peer-to-peer system rather than a client–server system, and makes use of background processing on computers running Skype software; the original name proposed – Sky peer-to-peer – reflects this.
Is Skype _really_ peer to peer? (Score:3, Insightful)
The evidence for it being p2p is:
The evidence against it being p2p is:
Re:Is Skype _really_ peer to peer? (Score:5, Informative)
No, the evidence for it being peer-to-peer is actually learning something about the technology instead or relying on some stupid article written by an idiotic FUDster. Now, authentication is done via a central server but all of the voice chat, etc is done via a peer-to-peer model using super nodes. A 3 second google search would have explained all this to you.
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If that were the case, why does the network go down?
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They explained this after the last outage if you read their blog. Basically they have a defensive measure in their P2P system to prevent client machines from getting overworked and burning through bandwidth, so after a supernode hits a certain level of use, it shuts down for a period. This increases the load on other super nodes which then shut down, etc, etc until it results in a waterfall collapse of the network because there are too many clients and not enough coordinators. Since new clients can't rea
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Explain how to efficiently handle conference calls without a central hub, please.
Re:Whoops (Score:4, Insightful)
If we both have a presence on the internet, there's no reason to involve a third party for us to communicate.
If you have medium term stable IPs and your own domain (though you could argue that relying on DNS is relying on a third party) then I would agree with you.
Most client machines don't have that. Many are behind NATs and even those that aren't may not have stable IPs. P2P should be used for the actual call data where possible but servers are needed to keep track of users locations and (if you want to provide a reliable service to those behind NAT*) to provide a fallback path for call data in the event that P2P transmission is not acheivable.
What we should really be doing is a system similar to email. With email you can either rely on a third party or host it yourself if you have an appropriate connection and there is no reason the same can't be done for VOIP.
* SIP doesn't really get on very well with NAT and worse the provider I used liked to pin the blame on NAT for half-calls despite the fact they had worked fine in the past with the same NAT.
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So, exactly who does your computer contact to find the address (IP) of the person you're trying to call? Some random other person until you find the person you're looking for? Not to mention the idea of directory poisoning in a distributed environment (think poisoned torrents). While your idea is essentially a good one on paper, it lacks a "phonebook" capability (Directory Service), and security. Skype isn't badly designed from that standpoint.
Chances are this was a configuration problem, not an infrastruct
Re:Another Option (Score:5, Informative)
I have an Ooma phone. Actually it's a device that plugs into my internet router, and into which you can plug regular landline phones.
It's like 15 bucks a *year* for taxes, and you get free calling in the US. No other charges. And you don't need to own a computer to use it. It's not like magic-jack where you need to have your computer running.
I also put 50 bucks in my pre-pay account, so I can use 411, and make international calls. The rates are competitive to skype rates for international calls. AND, you get a real landline phone number and can make calls to landline phone numbers. So instead of messing with a computer, when I want to make an international call, I just pick up the phone and dial. If someone calls me from another country, I tell them I'll call them back since it's cheaper for me than it would be for them.
Now the device is 200 bucks, but it's already paid for itself since I don't pay a telephone bill for a landline. And the call quality = that of any landline I've ever had.
No monthly fee. In a year, it pays for itself, and that's it. What a great deal! If you move, take your Ooma with you, and you KEEP THE SAME PHONE NUMBER no matter where you live, ( unless you want to change it ). Cell phones are nice, but they can be expensive. And if you are required to keep one for work, then having 2 in your pocket is annoying. Ooma is a way to have your OWN phone number forever for minimal money.
Why am I shilling? Because I want others to get a great deal. I don't want Ooma to go out of business because it gives customers such a good deal. ( I have no reason to suppose that it would.... ) For being such a good deal, I'll plug them once in a while.
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No, I don't, but then I wouldn't be surprised if it's common. People have all sorts of devices that require broadband internet that aren't 'computers'. Think of Playstations, and Wiis and Roku Netflix players etc. Ooma phones are just one more device like that that uses the internet and isn't a computer.
Re: (Score:2)