This fix puts an end to a saga that essentially start during the
Status Prague Meetup at the end of October 2018. At the time we were
experiencing massive issues with `Connecting...` spinners in the app in the
venue we rented. We were pulling our hairs out what to do and we could not
find the cause of the issue at the time.
Three months later I deployed the following change:
https://github.com/status-im/infra-eth-cluster/commit/63a13eed
Which used `iptables` to map the `443` port onto our `30504` Status node port
using `PREROUTING` chain and `REDIRECT` jump in order to fix issues people
have been complaining about when using WiFi networks in various venues:
https://github.com/status-im/status-react/issues/6351
Our thinking when trying to resolve the reported issue assumed that some
networks might block outgoing connections on non-standard ports other than
the usual `80`(HTTP)/`443`(HTTPS) which would disrupt Status connectivity.
While this fix could have indeed helped a few edge cases, what it really
did was cause the Status node to stop seeing actual public IPs of the clients.
But __pure accident__ this change caused the code we inherited from
`go-ethereum` implementation of DevP2P protocol to stop throttling new
incoming connections, because the IP as which they appeared was a
`172.16.0.0/12` network address of the Docker bridge.
The `go-ethereum` code used the `!netutil.IsLAN(remoteIP)` check to
avoid throttling connections from local addresses, which included the
local Docker bridge address:
https://github.com/status-im/status-go/blob/82680830/vendor/github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/p2p/netutil/net.go#L36
The fix intended to target a small number of networks with fortified
firewall configuration accidentally resolved our issues with
`Connecting...` prompts that our application showed us en masse during
our Prauge Meetup. Part of the reason for that is that venues like that
normally give out local IP addresses and use NAT to translate them onto
the only public IP address they possess.
Since out application is supposed to be usable from within networks
behind NAT like airport WiFi networks for example, it makes no sense to
keep the inbound connection throttle time implemented in `go-ethereum`.
I'm leaving `inboundThrottleTime` in because it's used to calculate
value for `dialHistoryExpiration` in:
`vendor/github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/p2p/dial.go`
I believe reducing that value one we deploy this change should also
increase the speed with which the Status application is able to reconnect
to a node that was temporarily unavailable, instead waiting the 5*30 seconds.
Research issue: https://github.com/status-im/infra-eth-cluster/issues/35
Signed-off-by: Jakub Sokołowski <jakub@status.im>
Jakub Sokołowski
fe8dab7391