Replication and Firewall 1

[ManishH]

Hello.

I am hoping somebody out there has a solution to my problem

We have a SQL2K publisher sitting inside the firewall. We have a SQL2K distributor sitting on the DMZ. Subscribers use FTP to replication. All SQL servers are configured only to use TCP/IP sockets. Named Pipes have been disabled.

Our problem is the firewall.

We are only allowed to open ports 21 (for FTP) and 1433 (SQL) between the Publisher and Distributor.

And there are two problems that we haven't been able to resolve.

1) When trying to configure the publication on the publisher, the snapshot folder location needs to be the FTP folder on the Distributor as per Microsoft Guidelines. The only way you can specify the snapshot location is using a UNC connection eg \\DMZ\Repldata

How can that be possible? We are not allowed to open the Netbios/etc (137,139,445) ports between the two servers, so we can use UNC connections.

Has anybody found a way around this problem? Or do you have pointers on how to get replication to work with FTP if the publisher in the in the LAN and the distributor is in the DMZ. I have really tried all possibilties and am now spent.

Many thanks in advance for your valuable pointers.

Manish
(South Africa)

 

[seong76]

Not sure if my Replication setup helps but, here's how my replications is setup.
I have server A in LA and server B in NY connected via VPN with all ports allowed. Both of the servers are Win2k/SQL2k stand alone servers. Server A is the Publisher and B is the Push Subscriber. Since both of the servers have different admin accounts, I have setup FTP for the snapshot in server A. When I was pushing the subscription to server B, I indicated ftp://servera as the snapshot location (Since I was indicating an FTP address, I didn't use UNC format of \\servera). I have used hosts file to map the server A to the IP address, since MS tells you to register the servers by name in the Enterprise Manager. I'm not sure if your replication will work with port 21 and 1433 since I haven't tried it. But I hope it works out for you.

 

[ManishH]

Hi Seong

I never ever thought of using Ftp:// as a location. and I haven't had the chance to try it, but I have a good feeling it could work.

Thanks for your tip. Will let the forum know if we get it working!

Manish