[Opensim-users] loopback question

[Thomas Ringate]

I have a basic understanding of what loopback is, and I think I understand why opensim requires this function.

My question is about any possible alternative if it is not supported by your ISP.

The opensim wiki suggests that the Verizon FIOS service and in particular the Actiontec MI424WR router supports loopback.  After spending a rather large amount of time and money with Verizon’s “premium” support, and long discussions with the Actiontec support people, it is clear that router does NOT support loopback.  Unfortunately Verizon in central Florida provides no other choice for the router they use in their service.

There is a very excellent alternative which is to place your own router that does support loopback between their router and the ONT.  This is in fact what most of their commercial customers do.  I attempted to do this, and for the week or so of my testing it was heaven.

Now I am a residential customer, and my wife has become rather dependent on “caller ID” appearing on our TV screens.  As luck would have it, unless the Actiontec router is the router directly connected to the ONT that feature does not work.  If you can do without that one feature, placing a router which supports loopback between the ONT and their router works perfectly for everything else.

I have tried every possible combination of using host files, DNS in the routers, different domain names.  Nothing so far can trick opensim to not use the FQDN of the network facing address for a destination that is on the local LAN.  Hence, it needs loopback.

The problem I see is:  because Verizon “kind of supports loopback”, which can’t really be explained by anyone, it responds very slowly and often gives the wrong addresses in the reply packets.  This results in lots of timeouts and eventually failure of the specific transmission.  Because this operation is not consistent, but rather random, sometimes things work and sometimes they don’t.

This manifests itself for me as a “client” with very slow logins, almost no chance of completing a TP within my set of regions, difficulty in saving notecards and scripts, and I suspect it causes problems for outside clients trying to TP between my own regions as well.  I have lived with this for 2 years now, my choice, but I was wondering if there is some possible workaround for this I have not yet explored???

I know I can configure things to be “local” or “remote” and everything works wonderful.  Configurations that allow both inside and outside local LAN work rather poorly but my present configuration focuses that poor functionality to me inside my local LAN.

I do know I can get a second service from Verizon, use my own modem on it, and use it for my servers.  That becomes a rather expensive solution over time for my hobby.





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