TechNote

Configuring Acrobat Connect Professional to listen on ports 1935, 443 and 80 with two IP addresses

By default,Acrobat Connect Professional listens on port 1935. In order for Connect Presentation and Acrobat Connect Professional to work properly, ports 80 and 1935 must be opened for the Connect servers in the corporate firewall/proxy as well as the clients (Participants or Presenters).

Sometimes there are situations where the client's corporate firewall/proxy server blocks port 1935 for incoming and outgoing network traffic. The client would need to open port 1935 for incoming and outgoing network traffic in order to connect to a Acrobat Connect Professionalmeeting. However, there are times when this is impossible for the client to open their corporate firewall/proxy server to accept network traffic on port 1935. Consequently, the responsibility falls on the individual who hosts the Acrobat Connect Professionalserver to properly configure it and open additional ports besides 1935.

If you realize that your clients cannot access Acrobat Connect Professionalon port 443 or 1935 after you had already followed the steps in this TechNote, you can also configure Acrobat Connect Professionalso that it will communicate on port 80 in addition to ports 1935 and 443.

The instructions below will walk you through how to add an additional port for Acrobat Connect Professionalto listen on.

Note: Port 1935 should still be used even though we are adding additional ports 443 and 80.

To setup Connect Presentation and Acrobat Connect Professionalon a single server that communicates on ports 1935, 443 and 80, you will need at least two network interface cards (not necessary but with two network interface cards, it can separate the packets on two cards) so that the Connect Presentation and Acrobat Connect Professional's traffic can be separated. You will also need two IP addresses. These two IP addresses must be assigned a DNS name and each IP address will be bound to each network card. Optionally, you could assign two IP addresses to a single network interface card.

We will be using an example so we can walk through the Connect configuration. It is necessary to make modifications to the Connect configuration files to implement this. In this example, we will be using these two IP addresses 128.1.2.3 and128.1.2.4, which will be assigned to presentation.janedoe.com and meeting.janedoe.com respectively. The NetBios or Full Computer Name of the Connect server will be called server-9 (Note: To find out the name of the localhost of the Connect server, you can type hostname and press return in the command prompt. Do not use an underscore in the NetBios or Full Computer Name as it is not supported, a hyphen is acceptable.). The ADMIN_HOST (in the custom.ini file) is set to presentation.janedoe.com. If you are using Network Address Translation (NAT), which means you use private IP addresses, then you would need to use the private IP addresses instead of the external IP addresses in the Connect configuration files.Acrobat Connect Professionalrequires using the primary IP address; therefore, it is necessary to set the IP address that is assigned to meeting.janedoe.com as the primary address in the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) in the Local Area Connection.

Let's modify the Connect configuration files to incorporate the ports for Connect Presentation and Acrobat Connect Professional.

Before we modify any configuration files, the following steps should be taken:

Open the Windows Services control panel.
Stop Adobe Connect Enterprise Service (formerly Macromedia Breeze Application Service).
Stop Flash Media Administration Server (formerly Flash Communication Admin Service).
Stop Flash Media server (formerly Flash Communication Server).

We need to modify the following two files:

%\Breeze\appserv\conf\SERVER-INF\jrun.xml
%\Breeze\custom.ini

Note: % should be replaced with the drive that you installed Breeze server on. For example, if we had installed Breeze on D: drive, it would be D:\Breeze\custom.ini.

Modify the Connect configuration files:

Open jrun.xml file usingany text editor.
Around line 93, locate the following section:
<attribute name="bindAddress">*</attribute>.
Replace the * with the IP address for the Connect Presentation, which is 128.1.2.3, so that line should now look as follows:

<attribute name="bindAddress">128.1.2.3</attribute>
Save and close jrun.xml.
Open %\Breeze\custom.ini usingany text editor.
On a blank line, add DEFAULT_FCS_HOSTPORT and add the IP address for Acrobat Connect Professionaland the additional ports 1935, 443 and 80. For example:

DEFAULT_FCS_HOSTPORT=128.1.2.4:1935,443,80
Copy and paste the following two lines and place them above the line "Congratulations":

USE_HOST_MAPPINGS=yes host.server-9=meeting.janedoe.com

Note: USE_HOST_MAPPINGS must be spelled in all uppercase and there should be no spaces between the equal signs. These two lines are case and space sensitive. Everything after the word "yes" should be typed in lowercase, including the localhost name of the Connect server.
Save and close custom.ini.
Start up Adobe Connect Enterprise Service (formerly Macromedia Breeze Application Service), Flash Media Administration Server (formerly Flash Communication Admin Service) and Flash Media server (formerly Flash Communication Server), in that order.

To test the new configuration, try logging into the Connect Manager by launching Microsoft Internet Explorer and enter this URL http://presentation.janedoe.com/. If you can see the Connect Login screen, Connect Presentation is working. Next, test Acrobat Connect Professional by visiting this page http://presentation.janedoe.com/common/intro/intro.html. You should see the Connect test bandwidth message. If this does not work, contactAdobe Connecttechnical support.

Note: The Flash Player will only try to detect ports 1935, 443 and 80, so using any other ports will not work.