[Wolves] Smoothwall or router oh and cionnection sharing?

[Ron Wellsted]

On Wed, 7 Apr 2004, Wayne Morris wrote:

> Ha, well yes in principle - but MSN uses a random port - one of a
> <large> number, can't remember if it was 100 or five hundred , which you
> can't specify - so you have to manually forward every port to your
> client, which would take hours to type in. i think the paid for version
> of smoothie allows you to do ranges ie forward 3400-3500 to xxx.
> This also applies to chat thru MSN as well btw.

This is one of the (very annoying) characteristics of the H.323 protocol.

Look at the Mandrake MNF8.2 firewall. Free download and it is much more 
versatile than smoothie, including allowing port ranges to be configured.


> The ftp thing I can't get my head around, it appears that a client with
> a bog standard pc and no separate firewall can get thru smoothie , but
> if the client has a standalone firewall or router they can connect but
> not get the data connection - my head hurts when i try to even describe
> this but its something like if they try an active connection then the
> ftp assigns a random data port which smoothie doesn't like allowing in,
> and if they try passive connection THEIR firewall won't allow the port
> that your ftp assigns.
> I gave up on my ftp server!
 
I don't blame you, while not ideal serving files via http(s) has the 
benefit of everything happening on port 80/443.

-- 
Ron Wellsted
http://www.wellsted.org.uk
ron at wellsted.org.uk
N 52.567623, W 2.137621