Polling tentacles in an environment where I cannot open any additional ports

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1

Hi

I have read a lot of discussions around this subject already. But want to be sure that I understand it correctly. And that I am not basing my conclusions on outdated information.

Like many others I am having issues with opening ports in production environment. The hosting provider takes a significant amount of money pr. month for open ports.

  • Installing a polling tentacle should be the way to go when your hands a tied in the environment you want to deploy to
  • When installing the tentacle, the wizard wants to connect to the octopus server on the same url as you use for accessing the web interface of the server. Usually port 80 or 443. This is however only for accessing the api during the tentacle install process and telling the server about the new tentacle. This works fine for me
  • By editing and running the tentacle install script manually it should be possible to change the default tentacle port from 10933 to “whatever you want”.

Questions:

  1. From some discussions I can see that it is however not possible to change the port to 80 or 443. Why is that? I understand that it should not collide with the port that is used for the web interface of the OD server. But if the server is using 443, why not let the tentacle use 80?
  2. If I can choose the port freely, shouldn’t I also do some configuration at the server to ensure that the server is listening on the port, that I choose for the polling tentacle? Or will the tentacle tell the server to listen on a given port using the api during tentacle install? (seems a bit strange that an api call can make a service on a web server start listening on a new port.)
  3. The server that I want to install the tentacle on is able to communicate to the “outside” on “normal” ports like 21, 25, because of the requirements of the applications running on the server. But I haven’t been able to get this to work. Again, it seems like I am missing some configuration on the OD server, telling it to listen to one of these ports

Hope you can help me understanding this setup a bit better, so I can find the best solution. Thanks.

Nikolaj

2

Hi Nikolaj,

Thanks for getting in touch.

You can change the Octopus Server communications port to 80 or 443 as long as it doesn’t collide with other registrations on the machine.

You must configure the Octopus Server to listen on a particular port for communication. You can do this via the command line by running:

Octopus.Server.exe configure --commsListenPort “80”

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Shane

3

Hi Shane

Thanks for your quick reply.

Your answer does not seem to match this answer:

http://help.octopusdeploy.com/discussions/problems/46125-i-need-a-polling-tentacle-to-communicate-with-the-server-over-port-443

Is one of the answers wrong or am I misunderstanding something?

/Nikolaj

Fra: Shane Gill tender2+d5db13d464@tenderapp.com
Sendt: 21. oktober 2016 02:44
Til: Nikolaj Kaplan
Emne: Re: Polling tentacles in an environment where I cannot open any additional ports [Problems #48263]

4

Hi Nikolaj,

The inbound port that Tentacles reach the Octopus Server on can be configured to whatever port you would like. The Octopus Server is listening on that port for Tentacles. On the Octopus Server you would need to have that port open to your Tentacles.

On the Tentacle end, you can not specify the port that polling Tentacles will use to poll the Octopus Server. The Tentacle will pick a port to use to establish the connection, much like a web browser does. Usually an outbound connection does not require that you open any ports.

I hope this helps.

Cheers,
Shane