Port Question

[Scott Slaugh]

> After much script wrangling, I was finally able to get Rev to talk itself
on
> two machines behind *the same* firewall on port 80 (8080).  My extremely
> limited understanding of ports and their numbers leads me to believe that
> this port is not commonly blocked (though obviously it could be) and is
> suitable as a default number (if not, feel free to correct me).

Most people don't block port 80, since it is used for web browsing.


> So let's say there are two machines behind the same firewall on one side
of
> the net, and two machines behind another firewall on the other side.  Do I
> need to determine both the public and private addresses of all machines
who
> want to play, and then somehow combine the addresses into a single string
to
> address socket messages?  Or do I just need the public address for each
> network (which I assume accesses each router) and then assume that
messages
> sent to port 80 will be forwarded to all machines on that network (who are
> "listening" on that port)?

You might just want to try out sending messages between machines behind
different firewalls.  However, although I'm not exactly sure how these
things work, I am inclined to say that you wouldn't be able to just send the
messages to the router.  I believe that most routers will just drop requests
if they can't figure out where they are supposed to go.  I think that you
would need to set up a process called port forwarding on the router, where
you tell the router to send requests for a specific port to a certain
computer on the network.  But, once again, I'm not entirely sure how
firewalls/routers work.

Scott Slaugh