Does Novell BorderManager support RTMPT protocol?

  • 7007004
  • 05-Oct-2010
  • 26-Apr-2012

Environment

Novell BorderManager 3.9 Support Pack 2
Novell BorderManager 3.9 Support Pack 2 Intern Release 1

Situation

Accessing some sites that use RTMPT protocol to stream video, an error is reported on the browser where the video should be seen and no video is streamed:

Http://url of the site:80/server not found.

For example http://reboot.fcc.gov/video-archives will show this error.

If bypassing proxy, video is streamed fine.

Resolution

Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) is a proprietary protocol developed by Macromedia for streaming audio, video and data over the Internet, between a Flash player and a server.

The RTMP protocol has three variations:

  1. The "plain" protocol which works on top of TCP and uses port number 1935 by default.
  2. RTMPT which is encapsulated within HTTP requests to traverse firewalls.
  3. RTMPS which is RTMPT over a secure SSL connection using HTTPS.
When using RTMPT thru BorderManager, BorderManager sees this traffic as normal HTTP traffic so rules applied for HTTP will apply as well for this traffic so it will go thru BorderManager with no issues.
The problem with this site is that the media server is not properly configured and before start streaming, browser tries to reach streaming.broadband.gov (208.23.64.75) directly to POST some information onto the stream server, bypassing proxy. If filters are enable and only way browser can reach the internet is thru proxy or local PC does not have a dns server configured, then the error will show up.
The problem lies on the web site configuration and not on BorderManager:
1. Best solution is to contact the administrator and report the issue so he can adjust the configuration.
2. If not, then Dynamic NAT will have to be enable on BorderManager server and a filter exception created to reach this site on port 80.