Well, I’m not sure mandating
anything is useful in a community, but an agreement published as a “best
practice” is certainly reasonable. Fixing port numbers limits the use of
the AG in non-public, disconnected instances, which is vitally important in
many circumstances.
I think what would be more useful is if
you described how you wanted “lay” participants to interact with
the Access Grid, then let the developers decide how to deliver that
functionality. For example:
Use Case 1: I want a tool that will let me
generate a list of venues for my users and put that list into their client as
their favorites.
Use Case 2: I want a tool that will let me
generate a list of venues on a web page for my users, each venue name should
launch the venue client in that venue.
Use Case 3: I want a tool that will let me
find the static configuration of all the venues my users use, so I can
configure my sites firewall appropriately.
I think the conversation of what venue
server providers configure as their configuration should be left up to you and
them, if they want to restrict ports, great. In fact it might be the best thing
for everyone to consider. If they don’t want to, or can’t for some
reason, they aren’t necessarily eliminated as possible users, just less
popular.
I suspect the use cases above solve your
problem if you’re using a firewall friendly server.
Btw, most H.323 solutions won’t tell
you what ports it uses for media traffic, it will only allow you to set a range
– we followed that model exactly and it doesn’t seem to be
sufficient. How come it’s sufficient for H.323?
--Ivan
From:
owner-ag-tech@mcs.anl.gov [mailto:owner-ag-tech@mcs.anl.gov] On Behalf Of Nagykaldi, Zsolt F. (HSC)
Sent: Monday, February 13, 2006
12:36 PM
To: Ivan R. Judson; R. P. Channing
["Rick"] Rodgers; ag-tech@mcs.anl.gov; michael.daw@manchester.ac.uk
Cc: bernholdtde@ornl.gov;
jsummers@bachman.cs.ou.edu; terrazas@labmed2.ucsf.edu
Subject: RE: [AG-TECH] One-page
summary of AG port usage -- please help us complete it
This is exactly why the AG community must agree on FIXED
port numbers (can I suggest a port registry for venues/rooms?? e.g. NCSA Titan
will also use these ports ... for video and audio). Which (along with the URLs
of individual rooms) should not change when servers are rebooted, serviced,
etc. This would make it possible to write simple batch files or apps that could
pull up individual rooms with set preferences (unicast, multicast, etc)
automatically with a click of a button. This would be extremely important for
regular meetings with individual "lay" participants.
Research Associate, Clinical IT Specialist
University Of Oklahoma
Health Sciences
Center
Department Of Family And Preventive Medicine
Oklahoma Center For Family
Medicine Research
Phone: (405) 271-8000 Ext.:1-32212
From:
owner-ag-tech@mcs.anl.gov on behalf of Ivan R. Judson
Sent: Mon 2/13/2006 11:41 AM
To: 'R. P. Channing
["Rick"] Rodgers'; ag-tech@mcs.anl.gov; michael.daw@manchester.ac.uk
Cc: bernholdtde@ornl.gov;
jsummers@bachman.cs.ou.edu; terrazas@labmed2.ucsf.edu
Subject: RE: [AG-TECH] One-page
summary of AG port usage -- please help us complete it
I think what you're hearing is unwillingness for
anyone to commit to a wrong
answer.
>From memory, the ports for vic, rat, and the rest of the tools are allocated
by the venue server. It can be a static allocation configured by the
provider or a dynamic allocation (I think the default).
Given this configurability, it's impossible to state exactly what ports the
media tools will or won't use.
Sorry for the complicated answer.
--Ivan
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-ag-tech@mcs.anl.gov [mailto:owner-ag-tech@mcs.anl.gov]
On
> Behalf Of R. P. Channing ["Rick"] Rodgers
> Sent: Monday, February 13, 2006 11:36 AM
> To: rodgers@nlm.nih.gov; ag-tech@mcs.anl.gov; michael.daw@manchester.ac.uk
> Cc: bernholdtde@ornl.gov; jsummers@bachman.cs.ou.edu;
> terrazas@labmed2.ucsf.edu
> Subject: RE: [AG-TECH] One-page summary of AG port usage -- please help us
> complete it
>
> Michael,
>
> Thanks, I agree that AG Central would be an excellent development resource
> and then final home for our summary of AG port usage. We certainly
need
> help completing it. The biggest gap right now is port ranges for vic
and
> rat.
> I just *know* that folks working with the code for these applications more
> actively than we do could produce these numbers in a few minutes.
>
> In browsing around in the AG Central forums, it appears that they have
> only
> received light traffic thus far, not that that should stop us from helping
> to
> kick-start the community there. It's not clear which forums would be
> optimal
> for our purposes -- I suppose "AG Toolkit/General"? So I'm
taking your
> advice,
> reattaching our two documents here, and also posting my original message
> to
> "AG Toolkit/General" on the forum at http://agcentral.org as wel.
>
> CORRECTION: just tried to do the above, and got completely wedged -- not
> clear that I have permissions to post to the forum, even though I'm
> registered.
> Then my web client got completely stuck. Will try again later,
sigh...
>
> Cheers, Rick Rodgers
>
> > From: "Michael Daw" <michael.daw@manchester.ac.uk>
> > Subject: RE: [AG-TECH] One-page summary of AG port usage -- please
help
> us
> complete it
> > Date: Mon, 13 Feb 2006 09:43:55 +0000
> >
> > Great work guys! This is going to be good.
> >
> > But, can I suggest using http://agcentral.org
for this? If the document
> is
> discussed and refined in a forum, it will be easy to find. Once it's
> ready, it
> can be posted to the help center. Because most of us still aren't
> completely
> used to using agcentral, you can always post frequently to ag-tech too
> with
> pointers.
> >
> >
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: owner-ag-tech@mcs.anl.gov
> > > [mailto:owner-ag-tech@mcs.anl.gov]
On Behalf Of R. P.
> > > Channing ["Rick"] Rodgers
> > > Sent: 10 February 2006 20:21
> > > To: ag-tech@mcs.anl.gov
> > > Cc: rodgers@nlm.nih.gov; bernholdtde@ornl.gov;
> > > jsummers@bachman.cs.ou.edu; terrazas@labmed2.ucsf.edu
> > > Subject: [AG-TECH] One-page summary of AG port usage --
> > > please help us complete it
> > >
> > > Dear AG Colleagues,
> > >
> > > I now realize that the work I started last December, trying
> > > to create a
> > > one-page summary of AG port usage (based on the commendable
> > > document created by
> > > Javier Gomez Alonso of the Access Grid Support Centre at the
> > > University
> > > of Manchester)
is not easily locatable in the list archives.
> > > I resend it,
> > > attached, along with the Excel version that David E.
> > > Bernholdt of ORNL kindly
> > > created. As I said earlier, all of these documents are
missing some
> > > key information, such as the port ranges used by vic and rat.
> > > I send this out
> > > again in the hope that another AG colleague will pick it up
> > > and complete it.
> > > We all really need to have something like this, and i would
> > > hope that eventually
> > > it would end up on the AG web site(s), and be maintained to
> > > reflect any
> > > coding changes/additions made to AG software.
> > >
> > > Best Regards, Rick Rodgers
> > >
> > > --------------------------------------------------------------
> > > ------------------
> > > R. P. C. Rodgers, M.D. * rodgers@nlm.nih.gov * (301)435-3267
> > > (voice, fax)
> > > OHPCC, LHNCBC,
U.S. National
Library of Medicine, NIH
> > > Bldg 38, Rm. B1N-30F2, 8600 Rockville Pike, Bethesda MD 20894 USA
> > > http://lhc.nlm.nih.gov/staff/rodgers/rodgers.html
> > >
> > >
> > >
> >
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ------
> R. P. C. Rodgers, M.D. * rodgers@nlm.nih.gov * (301)435-3267 (voice, fax)
> OHPCC, LHNCBC, U.S. National Library of Medicine,
NIH
> Bldg 38, Rm. B1N-30F2, 8600 Rockville Pike, Bethesda MD 20894 USA
> http://lhc.nlm.nih.gov/staff/rodgers/rodgers.html
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