Tech Forum

We have a deaf branch in our stake and are trying to set up the Sorenson videophone service. From what I understand so far it's essentially an internet-based video phone used for firesides, etc. for the deaf. We have wire and wireless internet in the building. Problem is that the port that the Sorenson equipment uses is blocked by the Church firewall. My understanding was that Church HQ had to just open that particular port and everything would work great. But I called Church HQ today and was told to connect the equipment directly to the DSL modem, bypassing the firewall. This doesn't make sense - I'd either have to run cabling out the room, down the hallway, and into the equipment closet each time I want to set this up, or have a dedicated jack somewhere in the building that always bypasses the firewall (defeating the purpose of the firewall in the first place). I know this is being used by other stakes. What have other people done? Do I just need to just keep calling back until I find someone that knows more that the guy I talked with today?

I'm not sure who you were talking to at CHQ, but if you want to work with this though tech support, you need to talk to Global Service Desk. They handle the firewall.

Steve,

The last company I worked for had several deaf employees and we had six Sorensen video phone units in three different locations. While it is possible to get these things to work behind a NAT/Firewall, it is a real pain. I would guess that the pain would increase exponentially not having access to change things on the firewall.

If I remember correctly and am not mistaken, Sorensen VRS units or users each have a phone number and when you setup the unit and it comes online, the phone number gets mapped to the publicly routable IP address of the VRS unit. Since we had more than one unit per internet connection we had to get a small block of static IP addresses for each location. Then each VRS unit got their own static, publicly routable IP address. It was not ideal, but it was the only way we could get them to work and be reliable.

Chad

You did not mention which level of filtering is implemented at your firewall. If you have General Access and are experiencing access limitations then the people at the GSD (GSC) should be able to help. If either LDS Restricted Access or LDS Extended access is implemented then the stake president should consider changing to General Access. Doing this would require the STS contacting the GSD and getting the filtering level changed. So in either situation the STS should work with the GSD on the issue.

stevecinhou wrote:was told to connect the equipment directly to the DSL modem, bypassing the firewall.

This could cause other problems. Either that will disrupt the Internet connection for the rest of the building, or it could cause two public IPs to be issued. That may or may not come back to haunt you depending on the policies of the ISP.

Just out of curiosity, was the person who suggested this a technical person or a, uh, shall we say, an "advocate" of the deaf?