Connecting problems

Introduction

As you might or might not know, all machines on the Internet have their own unique IP address.
A series of numbers, like 193.67.144.117. Because many people have a hard time remembering the
IP address of the mail host of their ISP, a so called nameserver was invented, which takes care of the
translation from a so called machinename ("www.cardweb.nl") to such an IP address.

Besides an IP address a computer also needs a so called port ("portaddress") to communicate.
This identifies the service you which to communicate with. The assigned number for HTTP traffic
(browsing/surfing) is port 80, POP3 (E-mail) on port 110 and NEWS on port 119. It is however possible
to use a different port address when browsing than the standard port 80, one just has to use an extra
: behind the URL. (E.g. http://cardweb.iota.nl:8080). The webbrowser than connects to the given
machine and port combination (resp. 195.108.17.20 and 8080).

Firewalls

When an internal network is connected to the internet, the networkadministrator will make sure that
no unauthorised access is possible. This to prevent mission critical information leaving the network or
to prevent employees from having only eyes on not work related websites. The network administrator does
this by installing special software ("a firewall") with he than uses to block certain services (ports) or
even entire IP addresses. In general such a firewall will be given lots of so-called rules describing what
is allowed to leave the internal network and what is allowed to come in from the internet. These are not
necessarily the same rules!

Cardbox Client

When a network administrator decides to allow only connections to port 80 (www), 110 (pop3) and
119 (news) and thereby disallowing all other ports, he inadvertently blocks the Cardbox Client too,
since this program needs to connect to the Cardbox Server on port 3105. (This port is officially assigned
by the international standard IANA.) So when it is not possible to connect to a Cardbox server on the
internet, contact your network administrator and ask him to allow connections to port 3105 on the internet.

CardWeb

The CardWeb server, being a Cardbox client and a webserver in one, also needs to be able to contact
the CardWeb Servers as listed in cardweb.ini on the internet on port 3105. Also, when you need the CardWeb
server to be reachable FROM the internet, you must ask the network administrator to allow port 80 on the
server to be reachable from the internet to, 80 being the standard webport, however in the cardweb.ini
file and port can be used and this given port must be allowed in from the internet.