[Feature Request] Local Mode (single country mode)

[As4pmq9]

The reason for this Feature Request is written in here.
#11

Though I am not a soft engineer, but I figure qtox will send request to all the root server all over the world(Please correct me if I was wrong).

And this behavior will be caught by the great fire wall of china(famous known as GFW), but GFW only detect request that toward out of china.

So I am hoping maybe qtox can choose to only connect root server which is only in one certain contry, if that country doesn't have ipv4 root server, then only connecting to local ipv6 server.

[gjedeer]

Maybe you can enforce it with firejail? Its --join-network switch has the ability to run firewall rules just for this program:

https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/Firejail.1.html

The list of IP addresses assigned to China is here - not sure how reliable:

https://github.com/17mon/china_ip_list/blob/master/china_ip_list.txt

If you need help feel free to email me.

[As4pmq9]

Thank you for the reply.
Maybe I can add those ip in windows firewall one by one

Is it possible to add a text box in setting which allow user to add those ip list, then qtox will only connect to the ip in list?

like this

[gjedeer]

There isn't a GUI for this, but if you put a file named bootstrapNodes.json in your settings path (on Windows it's appdata/roaming/tox in your user directory), it will read the bootstrap nodes to connect to from that file. The format is like this: https://nodes.tox.chat/json - you can just save the file I linked and delete the nodes you don't want. Or just create your own file that looks like this.

I can't see any nodes located in China though.

Documentation is here

qTox_enhanced/doc/user_manual_en.md

Line 463 in 343c1f7

## Bootstrap Nodes

[As4pmq9]

Yeah, sadly
There is no nodes located in china, so if I block all the connection out of china, qtox will be offline forever

[gjedeer]

If you know how to forward ports, you can run the node yourself. You don't have to make it public, just send bootstrapNodes.json to your friends.

[As4pmq9]

You mean like this?
{
"nodes": [
{
"ipv4": "my ip",
"ipv6": "my ip",
"maintainer": "xxx",
"port": random port,
"public_key": "randon key",
"status_tcp": true,
"status_udp": true,
"tcp_ports": [
random port2,
random port
]
}
]
}

Then I need to forward ports "random port2" and "random port", and send this file to my friend?

But there is a problem, in china, there is only one ISP give user public ip(expensive), and the public ip is also dynamic, ISP will change it about every 2 weeks.

[gjedeer]

Yeah, except - and I just realized this now - you would need to run tox-bootstrapd as the relay and qTox just when you talk to people. And - I just searched - it doesn't look like there's a Windows .exe file to download anywhere. I didn't know that when I was making the suggestion - in Debian it's in the main repos.

The reason why you can't do it with qTox is because of the public key you need to give to your friend (in the JSON you wrote above) - with qTox it changes every time you run it, and tox-bootstrapd is built to always have the same public key.

With the dynamic IP, yeah, very similar where I live. If you have some money to spare you could get a cheapest VPS and run tox-bootstrapd there (or, if that doesn't end up working for you, you can just run an XMPP/matrix/mattermost/... server instead). But I'm not sure if you have any cheap VPS providers behind the GFW. I'm talking something like $1/month with 512 MB RAM, completely low end.

[As4pmq9]

Yeah, there is cheap VPS in china, thanks for the patience

[zoff99]

@Tha14 can you help post the link to the tox bootstrap .exe for windows?
or to the repo for it?