troubleshooting Question
Firewall best practices for websites using nonstandard ports?
asked on
I'm sure this is a really broad quesiton with no good specific answer. Maybe I just need commiseration or something.
I had a user who wished to watch a Silverlight webinar hosted by a university, using streaming software provided by a private company.
The software vendor had a test presentation which worked fine. But when the user tried to join the live presentation, he was blocked. I didn't hear about this for two hours.
When I looked at my firewall log, I saw it had blocked TCP port 8081. But it was too late to go and open the port.
None of the documentation provided by the vendor or the university mentioned this port. Some searches on Microsoft forums showed a few Web developers redirecting their Silverlight servers across 8081, but nothing appeared to show this as a standard practice.
Few things disappoint my users more than their being unable to watch webinars. And guess who gets the hit. But I don't have any control over the consequences of other people configuring their servers in nonstandard ways. Or do I?
I had a user who wished to watch a Silverlight webinar hosted by a university, using streaming software provided by a private company.
The software vendor had a test presentation which worked fine. But when the user tried to join the live presentation, he was blocked. I didn't hear about this for two hours.
When I looked at my firewall log, I saw it had blocked TCP port 8081. But it was too late to go and open the port.
None of the documentation provided by the vendor or the university mentioned this port. Some searches on Microsoft forums showed a few Web developers redirecting their Silverlight servers across 8081, but nothing appeared to show this as a standard practice.
Few things disappoint my users more than their being unable to watch webinars. And guess who gets the hit. But I don't have any control over the consequences of other people configuring their servers in nonstandard ways. Or do I?
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