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Date:	Sun, 9 Mar 2003 10:03:57 PST8
From:	"J. R. Fox" <jr_fox@pacbell.net >
Reply-To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
Subject:	SCOUG-Help: Firewall & RealPlayer

Content Type: text/plain

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Peter, networking afficionados, and anyone else who may have some
interest:

This has little to do with our preferred OS (unless I should decide
it's worth the effort to get RealPlayer working in OS/2, either via
ODIN or VPC), but you may recall my mention recently that RP could
never provide streaming media content through my firewall. It always
failed with an obscure error, right away.

Well, I recalled skimming through a white paper Realnetworks had on
this subject, and I guess I remembered the gist of it, a good thing
since this document was well-hidden in their archives and I probably
would not manage to find it again. The salient point was that RP does
a bunch of different things to deliver its content to you, several of
which get blocked out by a decent firewall. I guess you could force
open a number of specific ports, if you knew where they were . . .
but that is probably not such a good idea, from a security
standpoint. (More of a risk when you're *not* running OS/2, I'm
guessing.) The white paper said there is a place in the RP
Preferences where you can turn OFF every transmission modality *except
for* HTTP, and _then_ RP can deliver streaming content through the
firewall. I tried this, and it works ! I think they also said
something to the effect that doing this could degrade the speed & / or
the quality of the media stream, but, as yet, I have no evidence of
that.

Jordan

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