[Pseudomizer]

Originally Posted by esology

When you say HTTP Tunneling - do you mean people that are stuck behind firewalls at work using a proxy server (port 8080) can get in to chat?

I am using FlashChat as a last resort because RealChat gets blocked for so many of my users. Curious how this functions.

Hello esology,

there are different ways of approaching this problem. Typically many chatter are behind a firewall. Some of them try to chat at work where the company's firewall is blocking chat access as well.

Most of these firewalls have many things in common like allowing access to specific ports like 25(SMTP), 110(POP3), 443(SSL) or 8080(Proxy Port).

DigiChat offers multiple ways of solving this solution. One if HTTP Tunneling where all packages are tunneled through e.g. Tomcat on Unix. DigiChat offers a library where you can specify tunneling with a specific port. Not easy to implement and you have to have deep knowledge of Unix and ports, networking, etc.

Another way of approaching this, is to start the chat server daemon on a specific port like the ones above. Doing this will allow every user behind a firewall to access the chat assuming that you do not have any other daemons running on your specified port.

I have placed the chat server daemon on port 443 because most of the companies allow SSL access to the internet and I received no complains so far but I am not able to use https on this specific server which I do not need at all.

Hope this helps to understand how tunneling works and what kind of workarounds are out there.

Cheers,