For most users, the best tool for configuring a simple firewall is the graphical firewall configuration tool which ships with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the Firewall Configuration Tool (system-config-firewall). This tool creates broad iptables rules for a general-purpose firewall using a control panel interface. For advanced users and server administrators, manually configuring a firewall with iptables is preferable. The incoming ports which need to be opened to accept a remote client login are the ports of the ALS server as set in the ALS Configurator, the ports used by the CORBA protocol, and the ports used by the REST based services.

CORBA listens on one static port and many dynamically created ports. The default of the static TCP port is 2809 as defined in the file omni.cfg. The range of the dynamic ports can be restricted in the file firewall.conf. The dynamic ports are opened by the software processes creating CORBA objects as they exchange information. Without specifying port ranges in the firewall.conf file a firewall cannot be used as all ports needed to remain open.

On the remote client side either Windows® or LINUX the ports used by the ASR (defined in the ALS Configurator) need to be opened as well. The CORBA ports are defined in the files omni.cfg and firewall.conf which are available in both Operating Systems. For more details and the file locations refer to the Product’s installation document. For more details on firewall settings refer to the [1KHW028766] Application Note – FOXMAN-UN in Firewalled Environment.