[AG-TECH] One-page summary of AG port usage -- please help us complete it

Mon Feb 13 12:50:41 CST 2006

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 at mcs.anl.gov [mailto:owner-ag-tech at 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 at mcs.anl.gov;
michael.daw at manchester.ac.uk
Cc: bernholdtde at ornl.gov; jsummers at bachman.cs.ou.edu;
terrazas at 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.

Zsolt

_ _ _

Zsolt Nagykaldi, PhD

Research Associate, Clinical IT Specialist

University Of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center

Department Of Family And Preventive Medicine

Oklahoma Center For Family Medicine Research

900 NE 10th Street

Oklahoma City, OK 73104

Phone: (405) 271-8000 Ext.:1-32212

Fax:     (405) 271-1682

  _____  

From: owner-ag-tech at 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 at mcs.anl.gov;
michael.daw at manchester.ac.uk
Cc: bernholdtde at ornl.gov; jsummers at bachman.cs.ou.edu;
terrazas at 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 at mcs.anl.gov [mailto:owner-ag-tech at mcs.anl.gov] On
> Behalf Of R. P. Channing ["Rick"] Rodgers
> Sent: Monday, February 13, 2006 11:36 AM
> To: rodgers at nlm.nih.gov; ag-tech at mcs.anl.gov; michael.daw at manchester.ac.uk
> Cc: bernholdtde at ornl.gov; jsummers at bachman.cs.ou.edu;
> terrazas at 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 at 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 at mcs.anl.gov
> > > [mailto:owner-ag-tech at mcs.anl.gov] On Behalf Of R. P.
> > > Channing ["Rick"] Rodgers
> > > Sent: 10 February 2006 20:21
> > > To: ag-tech at mcs.anl.gov
> > > Cc: rodgers at nlm.nih.gov; bernholdtde at ornl.gov;
> > > jsummers at bachman.cs.ou.edu; terrazas at 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 at 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 at 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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