Multiple ports

radz · Post by **radz** » 20 Jul 2006, 18:28

Hi,

We are experiencing a lot of problem with users that can't connect to our multiplayer app. Since some firewalls seem to only allow http traffic through port 80 it's not working for some users. The best solution we've found is using port 8080 but there are still many users that can't connect. One of our clients tell us 8 out of 10 of their users can't connect. Is there any way the SFS can listen to multiple ports and let the client try different ports in case one of them is working?

jflowers45 · Post by **jflowers45** » 20 Jul 2006, 18:49

One alternative would be to have a separate server for smartfox that has no webserver and just runs smartfox on port 80

radz · Post by **radz** » 21 Jul 2006, 06:38

Yes, we tried that earlier but a lot of firewalls and routers only allows web traffic through port 80 and therefore can't connect to the SFS. We found that it was more often working on 8080 than 80 because of this.

Post by **Lapo** » 21 Jul 2006, 09:54

Since some firewalls seem to only allow http traffic through port 80 it's not working for some users.

I see, especially http proxies can create this problem, because some of them analyze the http content, looking for black-listed websites, prohibited keywords, unwanted contents etc...

The server does not support running on different ports, however it wouldn't be very hard to add this feature and I think we'll probably add it soon.

On the other hand I fear that if users can't connect using port 80 or 8080 because of their corporate firewall, they will hardly be able to use any other port.
Bottom line: when the network admin is determined to block unwanted traffic/applications there's very little to do about it
Even HTTP tunnelling (which kills the socket server performance) usually fails because of the above mentioned proxy/firewalls settings.

Hope it helps