Gavin, Funny ... this was just the project I was working earlier this summer on my RedHat 7.2 setup. My symptoms were that Realplayer would just freeze up after putting up "Contacting..." message.
I'd start it on the command line with a bogus -h parameter and I could user View/Preferences to try to set some preferences. All to no avail. I then suspected the firewall as blocking packets. Did a lot of research about how IPTABLES works (good experience) and during the course of that activity ran across the web site http://morizot.net/firewall/gen/ which generates a firewall script. I studied that script, opened/closed ports that I thought RealPlayer wanted ... but still no RealPlayer. I learned an awful lot about IPTABLES, and that was worthwhile to me so I continued on my trek. Then it hit me. My sound card wasn't working. I noticed that I wasn't getting KDE's melody anymore when launching KDE. I tested a music CD, and sure enough, no sound. To fix, I removed the references to the sound card (last three lines) in /etc/modules.conf and re-ran /sbin/sndconfig. That kicked in the sound card. After that, RealPlayer works even with the firewall running (as built by the the firewall generator script I mention above). So my advice ... check that your sound card is working. If you wish to work more on your firewall, then consider that the script that the firewall generator program will give you with IPTABLES what they call a "stateful firewall". It monitors state even for both UDP and ICMP. �Since your machine is the client, the�streaming media is coming in response to your requests and should be�accepted by the rule accepting any input for an established connection. In other words, "you asked for it, you get it". If you didn't ask for it, you won't get it. Which in my view is the whole point of a functioning firewally. If you wanted to explicitly allow any inbound connection on ports for Realplayer�(whether you had initiated the connection or not), the command would be: $IPT -A udp_inbound -p UDP -s 0/0 --destination-port 6970:7170 -j ACCEPT I tried the above, but it had no affect (remember my problem as elsewhere). After turning on sound, removing the above, Realplayer still worked. As I thought about it, I realized that was perfrect. I still have problems with my sound card. I keep having to re-run /sbin/sndconfig with mixed results. I guess I'm going to have to change it out. But sound not critical to me and it goes to the bottom of my "todo" list. I really like Scott Morizot's IPTABLES script that are generated by his site. It's really well designed, and easily extensible if you want to fine tune your firewall. I read plenty of examples, but this script was the first on that pulled it all together for me showing all the relevant features of IPTABLES. Recommended. Good luck. rms On Tuesday 20 Aug 2002 12:13 am, Gavin McCord wrote: > On Mon, 2002-08-19 at 23:23, Gavin McCord wrote: > > I'm trying to get Realplayer 8 for Linux working. It's behind an > > iptables-based firewall. It looks like I need to allow TCP access to > > ports 554 and 7070 and UDP on 6970 - 7170. I'm not having much success > > though. It doesn't mention port-forwarding, but I've tried that as well > > without any luck there either. > > > > Anyone have any working firewall rules? > > > > -- > > gav > > To clarify slightly: my rules are strict in what they allow out as well > as coming in; default policy DROP, only allow out certain protocols, > allow in RELATED, ESTABLISHED stuff. > > If I allow any outgoing traffic, RealPlayer works. But I'd rather keep > my strict setup. > > -------------------------------------------------------------------- > http://www.lug.org.uk http://www.linuxportal.co.uk > http://www.linuxjob.co.uk http://www.linuxshop.co.uk > -------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Robert M. Schneider [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.lug.org.uk http://www.linuxportal.co.uk http://www.linuxjob.co.uk http://www.linuxshop.co.uk --------------------------------------------------------------------
