Topic: Opening Port 80 to a specific server?

[David Trask]

Hi,

Here in Maine we have a statewide laptop project going on with every single 7th grader in our state.  We have an automated backup utility on these laptops that backs up the contents of a backup folder to a specific folder on the internet that is associated with each user.  It works gawd-awful slowly.  One of my colleagues said that using his WatchGuard firewall he was able to go in and open port 80 going out to the backup server (which is located off-site at the University of Maine)and that increased his speed by a lot.  I thought port 80 was already open?  Maybe it's only open to incoming traffic but not outgoing?  Does this make any sense?  Can I accomplish this with the "portopening" rpm?


David

[Nathan Fowler]

Port 80 is already open on your E-Smith machine, he simply opened TCP 80 on his side so he could communicate with the server (It seems).  On a side note, WatchGuard is a worthless piece of Win32 garbage.  It causes more problems and offers little or no security.

My recommendation:  Use FTP, HTTP uploads are known to be slower than other alternatives.  Are you guys using some type of POST to upload the data to an HTTPD server?  Why not use FTP?  Why not create your own Winsock application?  Are you compressing the data before you are transferring it?

Hope this helped,
Nathan