[plt-scheme] Planet vs firewalls

On Jan 20, Jacob Matthews wrote:
> I considered this. The problem with this approach is that
> planet.plt-scheme.org runs both the planet service and the
> web-server, and anyway I wouldn't be particularly happy contributing
> to the general trend of treating port 80 as the Universal
> Every-Protocol Port.

There are several hacks that can make it better, two I can think of
are:

1. You can make the server listen on several ports, including some
   high ones, some known http alternatives (8080), and some service
   ports that might be open but you don't need the real service on the
   machine.  Then have the client try each of these ports.  (But
   failing all of them will be very slow.)

2. You can use the nice port stuff in mzscheme -- when you get a
   connection you can use regexp-peeking to see if the first line
   looks like an HTTP request and redirect the request to the web
   server or the planet server.  (Cute, but sounds like a bad idea.)

But the best solution IMO is close to your last sentence -- it's using
HTTP as the universal communication protocol -- simply transfer the
content through a web server.  Operating systems, sysadmins, ISP, etc
-- all will start helping you instead of complaining about the hole in
the wall.  (=> for other ports, the default is becoming to be more
restrictive, and for 80+HTTP you get forwarding hosts, caches, etc
etc.)

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                  http://www.barzilay.org/                 Maze is Life!