Firewall settings for Croquet

        I Googled for this and found nothing useful.  What
ports does Croquet need open on a firewall in order
to hook up over the net?  I'm talking about the
Demo Master and the Demo Client in the Croquet 1.0 SDK, here.
I had to turn off the firewall on both machines to get them
to connect.

Mike O'Brien

Look at TExampleDispatcher.  All the demos set up just one of these  
per set of Croquet worlds. (This is done in  
CroquetHarness>>createIsland:named:, and KMessageRouter  
runRouters:serverName:serverPassword:log:.)

The #listenOn: method (in the TConnectionDispatcher superclass) takes  
a port you specify as argument. The default is 0, which I gather  
makes the operating system pick an available port.
I always specify a port of my choosing.

Only the one machine running the dispatcher needs to have that one  
port open on the firewall. Everybody else needs to be able to  
initiate their own outgoing connection to that one port on that one  
machine.

For info on exploring the code, see https://lists.wisc.edu/read/ 
messages?id=1597602

On Jan 18, 2007, at 4:15 PM, Mike O'Brien wrote:

> I Googled for this and found nothing useful.  What
> ports does Croquet need open on a firewall in order
> to hook up over the net?  I'm talking about the
> Demo Master and the Demo Client in the Croquet 1.0 SDK, here.
> I had to turn off the firewall on both machines to get them
> to connect.
>
> Mike O'Brien
>

> Only the one machine running the dispatcher needs to have that one
> port open on the firewall. Everybody else needs to be able to
> initiate their own outgoing connection to that one port on that one
> machine.

        Thanks, that should do the trick.  My opinion is that the
demos should wire down some high-numbered port, and advertise that
number fairly prominently in the code, and mirror that in the
instructions.  This is similar to the sort of work necessary
to get Bittorrent or iChat to run, in today's world where a
functioning firewall is the only alternative to network suicide.
The pointer you gave to the location in the code will let me fix
that in my copy, at least.

        Thanks again!

Mike O'Brien

> I am just going through the same pain right now...  Can you walk me
> through it?  I am still unable to connect while the two computers are
> firewall off.  What am I missing?

        Unfortunately I have no idea.  As soon as I turned off the firewall
on both machines, I got a connection.  At least, on the pair of machines
that had a functioning OpenGL library.  When one of the machines was
a FreeBSD machine, I wound up with other problems which I'm pursuing on
the Squeak list.  So, step #1 is to make sure that you're able to run
the Demo Master standalone on each machine successfully.

        Step #2 would be to re-examine the firewall question again and,
if necessary, do a ping test on that port using your own private client &
server.

Mike O'Brien