How Infrastructure Management interfaces interact with firewalls

Firewalls block a wide range of TCP ports required by one or more Infrastructure Management components. Usually, this only affects the administration console because it requires a wide range of TCP ports for efficient operation. The operator console has an HTML interface, so it is usually unaffected by port restrictions because most firewalls allow incoming connections on port 80, which is needed for HTTP (web browser) access.

If a firewall uses NAT (Network Address Translation) whose translation is one-to-one, it causes problems for both the Administration and Operations Consoles. To overcome this, certain configuration changes must be made on the server.

If Infrastructure Management Server is behind a firewall and the NAT translation is many-to-one (for example, the firewall uses IP masquerading), then the Infrastructure Management Server is inaccessible to both the Administration and Operations Consoles.

For information about using Infrastructure Management through a NAT-enabled firewall, see Configuring for use with a NAT firewall.