Firewalls and WLE

Question

IHAC who is using WLE5.1, wants to get some recommendations on the number of
ports they need to reserve for a firewall which essentially sits in between
their WLE clients and servers. Keeping in mind that once the client requests
comes into a WLE domain at a known ISL port, the ISL process hands this
request off to an ISH process and assigns a unique port dynamically for the
ISH which in turn process the requests. So it appears to me that a remote
client transaction takes up two different ports to fulfill the transaction,
one to get into the WLE domain at a known ISL port and other one back to the
client after ISH takes up the request. So if this is the case I would
recommend having a range of ports to be reserved at the firewall depending
on the number of ISH's I would like to have for the application. For eg. in
the range of 1000 - 1010 ( for 10 ISH's). Well, if this is not the case I
would like to know whether its just only ISL port that matters to the
firewall and ISH ports are just WLE internal ports and are not exposed to
the outside world.
Thanks for any help.
-Justin

Answer 1

If your client is using Java callbacks, be aware that a client exposed IOR will contain the
clients hostname, and not it's IP meaning that each client must either be in the servers
DNS or .hosts file, In addition if the client is behind a firewall you'll have to open that
firewall to allow the servers callback connection through (ie: it initiates a new connection
back to the client rather than reusing the client initiated one )
All in all, if your client is using callbacks in an internet scenario they will have to
look at it a bit closer ;-)
cheers,
Paul
On Tue, 24 Jul 2001 12:47:39 -0400, Craig Perez <[email protected]> wrote:
There is only one connection per client to the ISL/ISH. The ISH assumes the
connection from the ISL. As for firewalls see the -H option on the ISL for help
with port mapping...
-Craig