WINDOWS 2000 PROFESSIONAL

PULL MEDIA PLAYER AUDIO THROUGH A FIREWALL

If your computer resides behind a firewall (or you're using a personal
firewall) and you can't get streaming audio to work in Media Player or
RealPlayer, open a few ports on the firewall.

Media Player can use several types of streams including UDP Multicast,
UDP Unicast, TCP Unicast, and HTTP Unicast on TCP port 80. In cases
where
the stream uses HTTP on port 80, you probably won't have any problems
receiving the stream because port 80 will already be open for HTTP
traffic.
You'll want to use TCP MSDB 1 for server-to-server communications. And
when you're accessing public streams such as Internet radio stations,
the
protocol you'll most likely use is TCP Unicast. To receive these
streams,
open port 1755 on your firewall.

You can also select the allowed protocols in the Network tab of Media
Player's Options property sheet. This enables you to restrict Media
Player
to a specific protocol and also lets you specify the port range used
with
UDP Unicast. So, enabling UDP Unicast media through the firewall would
require opening port 1755 as well as the range of ports you specify in
the
Network tab for UDP. The default is ports 7000-7001. If you open port
1755 on the firewall and still have problems receiving streaming audio,
try
opening ports 7000 and 7001. Or, specify a different range of ports in
the UDP options and open that range of ports.

If you don't have control of the firewall and can't get your network
administrator to open any other ports, open the Network tab on the
Options
property sheet and deselect all protocols except HTTP. This will force
the
connection through HTTP port 80. Depending on the bandwidth of your
connection and your PC's performance, Web browsing might affect the
quality
of the stream.

WINDOWS 2000 SERVER

EXAMINE IIS UTILITIES FROM THE WIN2K SERVER RESOURCE KIT

Are you aware that there's a wealth of utilities in the Windows 2000
Server Resource Kit that will help you manage your IIS server? Here are
several utilities that you should utilize:


* HTML TEXT FILTER (HTMLFLTR.EXE) is a command-line utility that can
remove comments and extra white spaces from your HTM, HTML, and ASP
files.
Removing those unnecessary characters will improve load time and
decrease
network traffic.

* HTTPCMD.EXE is a command-line HTTP client that can help you
troubleshoot Web server problems or help you better understand the HTTP
protocol.

* IIS MIGRATION WIZARD allows you to migrate configuration settings
from
another Web server to IIS 5. The wizard supports migration from IIS
4.0,
Apache, and Netscape Enterprise Server.

* METABASE EDITOR (METAEDIT.EXE) lets you directly edit the IIS
metabase.
With a user interface similar to that of Regedit.exe, this utility
allows you to back up/restore and import/export the database, as well
as add,
modify, rename, and delete metabase keys.

* PLAYBACK.EXE records all requests coming in to your IIS server and
saves them so that they can be played back on the same IIS server or a
different one. This utility is useful for creating test scenarios.

* The WEB APPLICATION STRESS TOOL is even better for performing stress
tests on your Web server. This tool realistically simulates Web
activity
and allows you to set the number of users to simulate the size, type,
and
rate of the request, and more.