Pete's questions

We have a need to connect two machines to one another, where "connect" means multiple (but known) TCP channels and UDP streams. We don't have very much control over how they each connect to the Internet - one end uses a proprietary satellite link, the other relies on customers providing their own Internet connection of some kind. Clearly in order to do this a "mirror" is needed whose address is fixed and known to both ends, to which they each send packets and have them forwarded on to the other.

This has been done in the past using an EC2 instance in the middle, but that puts on us the responsibility to handle scaling, failover, OS patching, and so on - ops tasks which are not our core business and which we're not staffed to do long-term. It seems to me that the correct approach is to outsource all that by buying in a "forwarding service" instead. Assuming such things exist; I'm actually mildly surprised that the ever-growing AWS catalogue doesn't seem to include anything suitable.

Can anyone suggest a suitable service? Reliability is a higher priority than price, I expect networking costs to be dominated by satellite data anyway. Bonus points for a UK presence since this will give certain customers warm fuzzies.

I haven't worked out all the details yet, but I guess the "customer connection" client is going to need to be coming in over a VPN (or some other kind of authentication?). Standard VPN technologies preferred, but at minimum any proprietary client must have a decent Linux version. The Internet connection to and from the satellite service I believe operates on a system of whitelisting IPs.

Any other thoughts on this situation are welcome, I'm at a pretty early stage of designing the solution. I know my way round a network but it's not my core skill.

Consider a Wi-Fi network with one access point and two clients, operating in marginal conditions due to range, etc. Client 1 is communicating with Client 2. Obviously the Access Point (AP) must be in range of both (assuming no fancy mesh modes, etc.) for the network to be deemed available, but does the data actually travel through it?

That is, does the AP receive the packets from one client and rebroadcast them for the other client to pick up, or does Client 2's radio receive the signals directly as they're transmitted from Client 1 and the AP just provides some sort of arbitration and metadata to help them find each other?

I'm particularly interested in how the answer to this would affect the case where the two clients are near to each other and have good radio propagation, but the access point is some distance away.