Firewall Issues

Firewalls can become a barrier between the Flash component and the IOS server. In a worst-case scenario the firewall only allows HTTP communication over port 80. If you only have one machine available for webhosting, it becomes necessary to have both IOS and your webserver running on the same port.

You cannot let 2 processes take posession of the same port, but since OFM and your webserver both talk the same basic language (the HTTP protocol) you can usually find a way to make a webserver pass on certain requests to IOS.

For the examples we assume :

• The IOS server is running on port 90
• The webserver's 'ios' folder should redirect to the IOS server.

The IOSServerURL field of the OrbitFlashMapConfig.xml file must be set to the new server url.

Apache can be configured to transfer trafic to a certain part of your site, to another server (which could be ios).
To do this, you need to enable the proxy module.

On Debian based systems, this means symbolic linking /etc/apache2/mods-available/proxy.load to /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/proxy.load (ln -s).

In the host configuration file, you can define a proxy :

ProxyRequests Off
ProxyPass /ios/ http://localhost:90/

If you also have the url rewriting module loaded, you can also specify proxies inside a .htaccess file, without altering your host configuration :

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
	RewriteEngine on
	RewriteLog "logs/rewrite_log"
	RewriteLogLevel 0
	RewriteRule ^/ios(.*) http://localhost:90$1 [P]
</IfModule>

Restart the webserver and visit http://<yoursite>/ios/. If the configuration is correct, you should see the index page of the internal IOS webserver.

Internet Information Server (from Microsoft) can supposedly also forward requests to an external server using virtual folders, but this has not been confirmed due to lack of hands-on experience.