A few questions about STUN

[Kinjutsu]

I've been having some trouble with STUN timeouts (as mentioned in another topic), which led me to question the necessity of using STUN. At first glance, what STUN requests seem to be doing is resolving the external IP, which I guess would be necessary for someone who does not have a static IP, but what about if I have a static IP, can I just specify my external IP when setting up my provider? Or does STUN serve another purpose as well?

I tried to find answers on google, but can't really find anything that clearly explains the purpose of STUN servers or what they do. Can anyone shed a light on this for me, in layman's terms if at all possible?

 

[francesco]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STUN
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3489.txt
""The protocol described here, Simple Traversal of UDP Through NAT
(STUN), allows entities behind a NAT to first discover the presence
of a NAT and the type of NAT, and then to learn the addresses
bindings allocated by the NAT.""

 

[Henk]

STUN tells where to go from here. This is not for static or dynamic IP address it is mainly for if you have one IP address for the outside world and another for the inside world.

For example it is common that networks internal have non routable addresses such as 192.168.*.* etc this gets mapped (translated if you like) to another ip address when it leaves your router to the outside world.

It is pretty mich DNS but than different .

H.