Faronics Insight - Manual (Page 14)

Faronics Insight User Guide
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Installing Faronics Insight
Faronics Insight Network Configuration
By default, Faronics Insight assumes that all Students will be on the same IP-subnet as the
Teacher. However, it is possible to configure Faronics Insight to function properly even when the
Teacher resides on a different subnet (or even a separate segment) from the Student.
IP-Subnets and VLANs
If the Teacher is on a different IP-Subnet from the student computers, the default “IP Broadcast”
UDP packets used by Faronics Insight will not be received by the Student, and that machine will
not be displayed in the Student List. Instead, you must configure the Teacher software to use
either IP-Multicast or IP-Directed Broadcast packets.
IP-Multicast supports the ability to have one device (a Teacher) send a message to a set of
recipients (Students) with special multicast addresses rather than a single device. IP-Directed
Broadcasts are special addresses which (when properly formed) will traverse your network as a
single directed UDP packet until the destination subnet is reached. Upon reaching the destination
subnet, the router will then convert the packet into a standard UDP-Broadcast packet.
For either transport method to work, it is important to first verify that your network routers have
support for that feature enabled. For IP-Directed Broadcast to work, your routers must also be
configured to forward IP-Directed Broadcast packets (sometimes routers refer to these as UDP
Directed Broadcasts) and the address of these packets must be properly formed. You should
contact your network administrator or refer to your hardware manufacturer's documentation for
further information on your network device features and configuration.
Insight Port Usage
Insight’s main port number is 796 (or 0x31C hex). All non-status broadcast and multicast packets
are sent to this port (796). The source port for these packets is dynamic (sometimes referred to as
ephemeral), meaning is it decided by TCP/IP at run time and cannot be specified. Generally it is
in the range of 49152–65535. All Insight PC’s must allow data traffic on port 796 to be received
and should not attempt to curtail the transmitting of data on ephemeral sockets.
When a Insight Teacher is performing an action on a specific Student (i.e. Control, Thumbnail
acquisition, Chat, etc.) the session oriented TCP packets are used. If the Student is a Fat Client
machine, then the destination port will also be 796. Again, the source port is dynamic.
Thin Clients are a special case. All UDP non-status broadcast and multicast packets are still sent
to port 796, but if the Student is a Thin Client Student, all TCP packets are sent to a dynamic port.
The port for each Student is therefore unique. In this case, it is possible for a Teacher to send a
TCP packet from a dynamic port to a dynamic port. However, in the Terminal Server
environment, most TCP/IP traffic takes place within the same computer and is little more than
inter-process communication.
There is one additional UDP Status packet which is used to monitor Insight activity on the
network. This traffic originates on port 1053 and is always sent to port 1053. It is either a
broadcast or a multicast packet. Insight will function without Status Packets, but functionality is
reduced (especially for a 1:1 environment where the enrollment data packets are used to detect
when a Student prematurely leaves a class.)