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distributed teams through public Internet?


Mervyn Keene (171177) | asked Mar 20 '09, 3:29 p.m.
Are most people using Jazz for distributed development opening up port 9443 in their firewall and letting remote users connect via the open Internet, or is all activity taking place inside the firewall?

Clearly the first alternative is easier and more flexible but if I have to make a case to management for it, there will be some push back and I'd better have all the facts at my fingertips. Can anyone provide anecdotes or pointers to documents making the case either way?

Thanks,
MK

4 answers



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Anthony Kesterton (7.5k7180136) | answered Mar 22 '09, 7:15 p.m.
JAZZ DEVELOPER
Are most people using Jazz for distributed development opening up port 9443 in their firewall and letting remote users connect via the open Internet, or is all activity taking place inside the firewall?

Clearly the first alternative is easier and more flexible but if I have to make a case to management for it, there will be some push back and I'd better have all the facts at my fingertips. Can anyone provide anecdotes or pointers to documents making the case either way?

Thanks,
MK


There is a third way - have a VPN into your network. I use this from home regularly, as do many other people at IBM.

anthony

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Mervyn Keene (171177) | answered Mar 22 '09, 11:18 p.m.
kesterto wrote:
There is a third way - have a VPN into your network. I use this from
home regularly, as do many other people at IBM.

It may be a minor semantic distinction but I was counting VPNs in the
inside-the-firewall column. In fact VPNs are what led to my question in
the first place. Let me elaborate:

Most financial, military, etc businesses have a restrictive VPN design
such that your PC is _either_ part of your home network or part of the
corporate network, with no bridging. This means that once a remote
worker starts the VPN s/he can no longer see the local printer, attach
to shares from other local PC's, etc. I've spent a lot of time working
this way and it's awful - you have to disconnect to print something or
look up a password, then reconnect to try the password, then disconnect
to see what to try next, etc., potentially losing your state each time.

IBM people don't experience this pain ... I've had the privilege of
working for IBM and I know their VPN is more user friendly than that.
Unfortunately I'm in the position of working for a place with the
obnoxious setup. Its effect on RTC is that remote workers - whether
geographically dispersed development teams or just people working from
home for the day - can see the Jazz server only when the VPN is active,
which means they lose many RTC benefits because they can't see work
items or accept/deliver without cranking up the VPN.

Ironically, this is making RTC seem like a regression from ClearCase.
The old model used ClearCase+MultiSite, which means that remote teams
worked against a local replica of the database and the VPN thing was no
problem.

That's why I'm hoping to make a case for using the "front door" by
opening port 9443 on the firewall. It seems to me that if a financial
institution trusts SSL with our banking data then it should trust its
own private data to it as well.

So the question remains - are there RTC customers who let their users
work over the Internet relying on SSL, and if so are there
justifications in existence? Alternatively, are there documented reasons
not to trust it?

MK

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Anuerin Diaz (4112517) | answered Mar 23 '09, 2:31 a.m.
Our RTC server is publicly hosted which makes it accessible to all members of our globally distributed team. We are also behind a very restrictive firewall so our server is configured to use the standard SSL port (443). The RTC server is using the LDAP authentication.

We also have a second type of group who uses the RTC as their ticketing system so they only use the web front end. I think the only justification we used is that it makes sense and minimal overhead.



ciao!

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Anthony Kesterton (7.5k7180136) | answered Mar 23 '09, 6:11 p.m.
JAZZ DEVELOPER
kesterto wrote:
There is a third way - have a VPN into your network. I use this from
home regularly, as do many other people at IBM.

It may be a minor semantic distinction but I was counting VPNs in the
inside-the-firewall column. In fact VPNs are what led to my question in
the first place. <snip>

Fair enough...

I suppose one example you are looking at right now is jazz.net. We are coming in as contributors rather than developers, but if you browse one of the projects - you are accessing the same space as the developers inside the network (At least that is my understanding).

I would go with your first instinct, SSL and opening the port.

anthony

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