Miscellaneous
Co-Branding
Cobranding. One of the very powerful capabilities of Chatterbox is its ability to be cobranded. To cobrand the server, we will need to configure the license server with the url of the homepage. In the home directory of that web page can be placed a gif file to be used as the logo.
-
cblogo.html - The html that contains the logo and target's for click that html should look like:
<html>
<body leftmargin="0" marginwidth="0" topmargin="0" marginheight="0" scroll="no">
<a href="http://www.howudodat.com" target="_blank">
<img src="http://www.howudodat.com/cb/cblogo.gif">
</a>
</body>
</html>
- cbgettingstarted.html - a html file, or redirect to some basic documentation
- a default page - that the user is taken to when they click on the logo.
Directory Listings
White Pages, directory listings, etc: The chat server can post a list of all users in all rooms to a particular web page. This is done through a normal POST command to a CGI. To enable this feature, run regedit and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\pc_chat. Add a "string" entry called "whois" set the value for this entry to a valid url, ie: http://download.howudodat.com/cgi-bin/dumpcgi.cgi. The server will then post the contents of the rooms to that cgi every 30 seconds. The format for the data is as follows
<rooms> start of rooms<ROOMNAME1> name of the first room
name,name, comma separated list of names
</ROOMNAME1> end of first room
<ROOMNAME2> start of second room
... continues through all rooms
</rooms> end of all rooms
Chat server Firewall Proxy Settings
The chat client is designed to be totally firewall aware and independant. The server on the other hand is not. For the server to work properly, 2 things are required:
-
The server must be able to access the internet to retrieve its license. This is done over HTTP. If there is a proxy server / firewall between the chat server and the internet, you may need to configure the server to use a proxy server. To do this perform the following steps:
- Check your proxy settings. In IE, go to tools->Internet Options, click on Connections, then on LAN Settings, if the "Use Proxy Server" check box (3rd check box) is checked you need to write down the information (server name / ip and port number). If this box is not checked, and one of the first 2 check boxes is, you will need to contact your network administrator to determine your manual proxy settings. If none of the boxes are checked, then you are not using a proxy type firewall.
- click on Start->run type in: c:\chatterbox\chatclient config proxyport=PORT&proxy=SERVER. Where PORT is the port number from step 1 and SERVER is the ip address or dns name of the proxy server from step 1.
- Check your proxy settings. In IE, go to tools->Internet Options, click on Connections, then on LAN Settings, if the "Use Proxy Server" check box (3rd check box) is checked you need to write down the information (server name / ip and port number). If this box is not checked, and one of the first 2 check boxes is, you will need to contact your network administrator to determine your manual proxy settings. If none of the boxes are checked, then you are not using a proxy type firewall.
- Users on the internet must be able to reach the chat server. This is done over SSL (port 443). If you have some type of firewall / NAT / router etc, you may need to configure such device to pass 443 traffic to the chat server. Consult the appropriate documentation for your product. It will be a similar setup as if you were configuring it to host your own web server.
Retrieve License Troubleshooting
If you are having problems with the license key being retrieved, there is some debugging information that might help. First, in the chat manager under logging, ensure that License debugging is turned on. By default if a license retrieval fails, we will test connectivity back to our license servers. You can add additional servers to test, by performing the following steps:
- Run regedit
- goto HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\pc_chat
- add a new string value called ping
- add a semicolon delimited list of names / addresses to ping (ie. www.foo.bar;www.bar.foo)
This will instruct the server to ping other machines during the test as well. What servers should be listed there? The best bet to determine outages is to understand the normal route a packet takes to get to our servers. To do this perform a series of traceroutes to different addresses and note the path. Then take an address that is the same along the way. We recommend an address that is 2 or 3 hops away from your server. This will test your ISP. Note: for this feature to work, ping must be allowed to pass through your firewall. Here are some example traceroutes:
C:\>tracert www.aol.com
Tracing route to aol.com [205.188.160.121] over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 <10 ms <10 ms 10 ms 63.167.144.1
2 <10 ms 10 ms 10 ms sl-gw9-che-5-0-0-TS28.sprintlink.net [160.81.54.69]
3 <10 ms 10 ms <10 ms sl-bb20-che-0-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.15.246]
4 30 ms 20 ms 21 ms sl-bb22-chi-11-1.sprintlink.net [144.232.18.190]
5 20 ms 20 ms 30 ms 144.232.9.50
6 40 ms 50 ms 50 ms agr3-loopback.Washington.cw.net [206.24.226.103]
7 40 ms 50 ms 40 ms dcr2-so-6-2-0.Washington.cw.net [206.24.238.185]
8 40 ms 50 ms 40 ms america-online-vienna.Washington.cw.net [206.24.238.218]
9 40 ms 50 ms 40 ms bb2-ash-P0-0.atdn.net [64.236.2.221]
10 40 ms 50 ms 50 ms bb2-dtc-P0-2.atdn.net [64.236.2.242]
11 50 ms 50 ms 40 ms pop1-dtc-P5-0.atdn.net [204.148.103.30]
12 40 ms 50 ms 50 ms ow1-dtc-P0-0.atdn.net [204.148.98.222]
13 40 ms 50 ms 40 ms www2-dr6-P0-0.aol.com [205.188.172.126]
C:\>tracert www.cnn.com
Tracing route to cnn.com [207.25.71.5] over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 10 ms <10 ms <10 ms 63.167.144.1
2 10 ms 10 ms 10 ms sl-gw9-che-5-0-0-TS28.sprintlink.net [160.81.54.69]
3 <10 ms 10 ms <10 ms sl-bb20-che-0-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.15.246]
4 30 ms 20 ms 20 ms sl-bb23-chi-6-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.19.194]
5 30 ms 40 ms 50 ms sl-bb20-atl-10-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.8.133]
6 30 ms 40 ms 40 ms sl-bb22-atl-14-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.12.146]
7 30 ms 40 ms 50 ms sl-gw11-atl-9-0.sprintlink.net [144.232.12.90]
You will notice in our case the last common hop is #3 [144.232.15.246]. The last common address should be picked as it will verify the ISP's connectivity. A similar pattern will emerge with every ISP. Additionally you can add 144.232.15.246 to the ping list, as this will test connectivity to our ISP. So... Ping [1] license.howudodat.com (default), [2] 144.232.15.246 (default), and [3] a.b.c.d (from your ISP). Failure matrix:
| 1 | 2 | 3 | Result |
| fail | pass | pass | The local access to our license server is down |
| fail | fail | pass | A peering relationship is down. Often called a brown out it is rare, and represents a failure in the cloud. In this case, try pinging (through a dos prompt) other addresses, www.aol.com, www.yahoo.com, etc. |
| fail | fail | fail | The local acces to your chat server is down. |
| * | * | * | Any other combination is invalid and indicates a really strange phenomenon, ie: Time to buy a lottery ticket :) |
The results of the test will be stored automatically in c:\chatterbox\server.log. Please email this log to our support.
More to come...