id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	priority	milestone	component	version	resolution	keywords	cc	blockedby	blocking	notify_on_close	platform	project
3687	Find a way for VR meeting to handle firewalls	Tom Goddard	Tom Goddard	"For two people at different universities to have a VR meeting one currently needs to allow incoming connections from the other on port 52194 (or some other port specified in the meeting command).  But typically universities have firewalls that block all incoming connections except for known web servers and ssh.  Outgoing connections are usually not blocked.  What is a simple and widely applicable way for the two parties to hold a VR meeting.

One simple approach is that one of the participants asks their university IT department to open up the firewall port 52194 for their computer.  I have done this at UCSF for our two vizvault VR computers.  It took about 10 days to get approved.  I am not sure the UCSF firewall still allows incoming connections on this port to those machines as changing security policies may have closed it.

Another approach is that the participants connect to a computer outside their firewalls and traffic is passed through that machine.  For instance the outside machine could be a cloud virtual machine using Amazon Web Services, or could be a commercial VPN service.

Another approach is that UCSF could have a computer that serves as the middle-man and has UCSF firewall ports opened to accommodate this and it could be used for meetings that don't involve UCSF -- we provide it as a service.  A drawback of this is that researchers across the world in Europe, China, Australia may experience poor performance with all VR traffic routed through San Francisco.  Conrad started on this approach but it so far has not worked due to some problem with the code he wrote for the middle-man server."	enhancement	closed	major		VR		fixed						all	ChimeraX