I've been on the phone with Adobe for 3.4 hours now. I've been transfered from
Dan in Customer Serivce (45 min wait) to Garry ? in Enterprise Customer
Serivce to someone in presales, and now I'm just not writing down names any
more as I'm just getting exhausted. My question should be simple enough -
my company is considering using Media Server, and I've been asksed to show a
quick and dirty demo of how our product would look in a shared user
environment. According to the Adobe site, the Flash Media Server trial is
fully functioning, only limited by a 10 user max. I assume this means that i
can place a copy on our web server, and our bosses downtown can use the
internet to view this site, correct? I have a very, very simple Flash Comm 1.5
example called shared ball on our server. Anyone inside our network can
visit our company site and see the ball move as other users move it. When
someone outside of our network looks, the ball stays still. We've updated the
router to do port mapping for port 1935, sending any 1935 data to the web
server that houses the app. I've checked everything I can, and it just
doesn't want to run outside. Inside it's beautiful, outside it just doesn't
work. We found an old version of Flash Comm 1.5, and tried installing it
after we uninstalled FMS 2.0, and Flash Comm 1.5 had the same issue: no one
outside of our buidling could see the site. The connection url's are all
correct, we're now using rtmp://www.ourdomain.com/tutorial_sampleball/ (room 1
I think) - and I've checked these user groups and followed all of the advice
I could find, but it stil won't work. Please, any advice??? I'm stil on hold
as I write this post - I'm hoping that I might get a response from this post
before I get someone to answer :grin :-)

It sounds to me like one of two things:

1. A firewall issue, either on your end or the client end. Is your firewall
configured to allow inbound kepp-alive connections to FMS on port 1935 and/or
80?

2. An rtmp path issue. Is the .swf being served from the same local machine as
FMS? If not, you'll need to adjust your rtmp string to point to the correct
location. Most of the samples use localhost as the domain, but if the .swf is
not on the same server as FMS, then the host needs to change.

Ok, here comes fun.... I've found out that everything actually is set up
properly, but now we're running into the issue where IT has blocked port 1935,
or whatever the default port is for FMS. They are now concerned, as this is
such a huge project, that a lot of their potential clients might not be able to
see this site. I have read in a few places that you can change the default
port number in Adapter.xml, and have attempted to use 8080, but it didn't work
too well.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Ideally, FMS will have it's own IP, and it will bind to ports 1935, 80, 443,
and whatever other ports you want to use.

When it comes to client side firewalls, there tow matters to consider. The
first is port access, which binding FMS to port 80 will typically correct. The
second matter is protocol. Some very strict firewalls will only allow http
packets to move across port 80. To get around this, you can use the rtmpt
protocol (referred to as http tunneling) which wraps the rtmp packets in http
headers. Using tunneling will get you through just about any firewall, but
rtmpt is a little slower than rtmp.

To handle the connection, there are a couple of approches you can take. A
popular choice is a connection "shotgun" which attempts rtmp connections on
1935, 80 and 443, and rtmpt connections on 80 and 443. Whichever connects first
winds, and the other connection requests are cancelled. This all happens in
your client side actionscript.

I prefer to do take a on-at-a-time approach, trying each connection
individually and assiging a 5 second timeout on the results.

[quoted text, click to view]
www.domain.com with an ip of 11.11.111.1111, the swf file and html file would
be accessed via www.domain.com/test.html, and I have a secondary external ip of
11.11.111.112 being routed to the same server running FMS, in my .as, I would
literally write code to call rtmp://11.11.111.112? If so, then I'm saved. Any
advice you have would be appreciated.<<

You would use WAN IP you're using for FMS. It doesn't matter where the .swf is
served from.

Thank you again for your response. I've actually attempted to contact you via
phone to verify your rates as I have some projects that might be best worked on
by an expert. You'll see me dialing in with a phone number that ends in 0908
on caller ID.

For now, this is just perplexing. I've installed FMS on a seperate server.
It's running on port 80, and has it's own domain name. The domain points to
an outside IP which serves as the gateway IP on the router. The router takes
all port 80 traffic from the new external ip and routes it to the new second
box. Inisde the Flash movie, I'm calling
rtmp://www.newdomain.com:80/testapp. I've tested it, and had 3 others outside
test it. We're all getting good results. When I have the execs try it in the
corp offices, they still don't see any functionality, and I don't see them in
the admin console. Adaptor.xml has been updated to show :80. Is there
anything else I'm forgetting? They can view the page, it just doesn't
register them on the admin server, and of course, none of the shared screen
assetts are moving, and no shared text is updating when it should. What
else could this be? Everyone else outside of the buildling can see it
perfectly, and I can see outsiders using the admin tool. Is the server /
router receiving on port 80, but responding on 1935 somehow? Not sure what
else this could be. Any help would be appreciated.

Since you've had other people from the outside world able to connect, I'm
thinking it's a security issue on the network at the corp offices. If they have
really tight security, their network proxy might be sniffing packets to make
sure they are satisfied with them. The IT people there may also be preventing
keep alive connections without specific permission.

When a client connects to FMS, all of the traffic happens on the port used for
the connection. If you connect on 80, FMS responds on 80. There's no mixing of
ports going on in the background there.

Contact the network admnistrator responsible for security on the network, and
tell him/her exactly what you need, which is permission for keep alive
connections on 1935, 443, and 80, and permission to send/recieve rtmp packets.

I am available for consulting, but since this isn't really an FMS or server
issue, it's not a job for me. I'm an application developer... but it seems you
need a network admnistrator at the moment.