Firewalls

[Naith]

Hey,

I'm configuring CE9 on Win2003. The nature of the project here is that the CE users will be coming in from unknown domains, so will need to be verified by coming through a Netilla v4.0 firewall, which in turn, provides a link to the ePortfolio login page.

The situation is that once I go in through the firewall, login to ePortfolio and start looking around, I retain navigational ability (acitvating folders/buttons etc) but I do not get the little (activeX?) popup window that prompts View/Schedule/History that should come up when you click on a report - and so, can't actually execute any reports from ePortfolio.

If I access the server without using https, ePortfolio is fine. So, what's the deal here? Have you successfully integrated CE with a firewall and secure webpages before? It doesn't have to be Netilla - stories about any firewall will do - Nokia, Sonicwall - I don't care. Just gimme something to work with here!

Thanks,
Naith

 

[Turkbear]

Hi,
The key to Firewall usage, at least in 8.5, is to specify the port(s) on which the Web Connector/WCS communicates and to open these ports in the firewall..

Look at the docs for more info on Firewall usage and how to specify those ports.

The Technical Papers at Crystal support have info for 8.5 but I could not find any for 9..

 

[Naith]

It's the same doc for 9, I believe.

The only compulsory port I managed to derive from their KBase document was 6400, which is already open.

As Netilla is a reverse proxy rather than an IP filter, it would have been sexy to get it working with this setup. But, as time's of the essence, I'm just going to switch direction and install TSCAL to fool Crystal into thinking that the traffic coming from the firewall is internal traffic instead.

Cheers for your help.

Naith

 

[TedLiu]

We have application server running inside DMZ and CE report server is behind firewall. We just open another port as 6401 and it works very well. I remember you also need to modify the WCS command point to port 6401 exactly same as from Crystal's document.

Hope it helps.

Ted

 

[Turkbear]

Hi,
6400 is the port for one direction only - After passing the request by this port a random port is used for the 'actual' communication UNLESS, as the docs indicate , you specify another port for this 'conversation' -

 

[TedLiu]

You are right. You need to specify a port to do the 'actual' communication to substitute the random port communication which will be blocked by the firewall. I can't access the CE report server now to get the exactly setting and port we used, but i'm pretty much sure that was what I did at that time. Crystal Support didn't provide any information except the document. We have 2 application servers all connect to CE report server by this way.

Ted