Hi everyone,

We've been using FMS 2 for a couple of years now and it's worked very well.

There is one issue we want to improve, and that's getting streaming working
across corporate firewalls.

We set up FMS on a server that was already running IIS on port 80, so our FMS
uses port 1935.

This is a problem for some of our corporate clients who are trying to use the
system from behind a firewall. Understandably they're reluctant to open ports
on their firewall.

Having researched this problem, the two main options I've seen are:

1. Set FMS to use port 443, as that's a port commonly open on corporate
firewalls. One problem we may encounter though is the firewall checking the
packet data and rejecting RTMP traffic over this port. If that occurs, is that
where we use HTTP tunneling?

2. Move the FMS so that it's on a server where it can use port 80.

I have a development system on which I'm going to run some tests, but I was
wondering whether you have any advice about this matter.

Thanks for your time,

Ajay P

Ideally, you'd want to have port 80 open. Can you add another IP address to the
NIC? That way, you'd have another port 80 for FMS to bind to (on that note, if
you're using IIS6, be sure to use httpcfg to turn off socket pooling).

Using tunneling will save you in some cases. When tunneling, you're
essentially wrapping the RTMP packets in HTTP headers, so in some cases where
the client network is inspecting packets, even tunneling might not save you.

Also, keep in mind that tunneling is a lot slower than using RTMP, and it can
often help to try ports before protocols. For my applications, I like to make
the following connection attempts:

rtmp:1935
rtmp:80
rtmp:443
rtmpt:80

Thanks for the reply, JayCharles.

Adding another IP address to the NIC isn't something I considered, so I'll
discuss that with colleagues and see whether we can do that.

I'll try to post back here with a description of what we did to solve this.

Ajay

JayCharles,

We followed your steps and managed to get it working!

Thanks,

Ajay

Ideally, you'd want to have port 80 open. Can you add another IP address to the
NIC? That way, you'd have another port 80 for FMS to bind to (on that note, if
you're using IIS6, be sure to use httpcfg to turn off socket pooling).

Using tunneling will save you in some cases. When tunneling, you're
essentially wrapping the RTMP packets in HTTP headers, so in some cases where
the client network is inspecting packets, even tunneling might not save you.

Also, keep in mind that tunneling is a lot slower than using RTMP, and it can
often help to try ports before protocols. For my applications, I like to make
the following connection attempts:

rtmp:1935
rtmp:80
rtmp:443
rtmpt:80

Thanks for the reply, JayCharles.

Adding another IP address to the NIC isn't something I considered, so I'll
discuss that with colleagues and see whether we can do that.

I'll try to post back here with a description of what we did to solve this.

Ajay

JayCharles,

We followed your steps and managed to get it working!

Thanks,

Ajay