Streaming Media Supplement sa2150 and sa2250

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Chapter 2 Media-IXT Deployment Scenarios
SOCKS server using the SOCKS protocol. The SOCKS server proxies requests out to the origin servers and
sends results back to Traffic Server, which then answers the client request. See the HP Cache Server Appliance
Administrator Guide for details.
When we discuss SOCKS, we talk about Traffic Server rather than Media-IXT, because RealProxy does not
use the Traffic Server SOCKS feature; nor does RealProxy have its own SOCKS functionality.
The Traffic Server SOCKS feature has not been tested for streaming WMT and QuickTime content, so it can
not be considered supported by HP. In theory, streaming WMT and QuickTime should be able to use the Traffic
Server SOCKS feature.
Third-party SOCKS implementations which “socksify” all outbound connections also exist. These handle
RTSP as well as other protocols.
For more information about SOCKS, see the SOCKS FAQ at:
http://www.socks.nec.com/
Overview of firewalls and Media-IXT
Media-IXT is being used, at various sites
• with both application-level and network-level firewalls,
• in explicit and transparent forward proxy deployments,
• for RealNetworks, WMT, and QuickTime streaming formats,
• for both on-demand and live content.
Some deployments use both an application-level and a network-level firewall (running on separate hosts) with
Media-IXT. Note that the popular Gauntlet Firewall v5.5 can run both as an application-level firewall (proxy
mode), and as a packet filter (packet filter mode).
That said, firewall support as a Media-IXT feature is still under development. Streaming RealNetworks content
across an application-level firewall is the only configuration tested and supported by HP for Media-IXT 4.x.
One important question to consider in designing a Media-IXT deployment around a firewall is whether the
firewall should allow UDP packets to pass through.