Thick client separated from the CMS by NAT

You can publish reports or analytic objects to Crystal Enterprise by saving these objects to Crystal Enterprise from within Crystal Reports or Crystal Analysis, or by using the Crystal Import or Publishing Wizards. However, if there is a firewall between the computer running one of these thick clients and the Crystal Management Server (CMS), this operation fails.

Configuring your Crystal Enterprise system to support this configuration when the firewall uses Network Address Translation (NAT) is very similar to configuring your system to support a NAT firewall between the application tier and the Crystal Management Server (CMS).

First you must configure the CMS and the Input File Repository Serve to use externally routable fully qualified domain names (FQDN) and fixed port numbers for communications. Next you must configure the hosts file on every machine behind the firewall that runs a Crystal Enterprise server so that the servers can map these externally routable FQDN to internally routable IP addresses (including the application server, if it is on the same side of the firewall as the CMS). Finally you must alter your firewall rules to facilitate communication across the firewall using the fixed addresses and ports that you have specified.

Note:    Instead of configuring the hosts files, you may wish to set up a separate DNS server behind the firewall to recognize the FQDN and translate them to internal addresses.

For full instructions, follow the detailed steps in Application tier separated from the CMS by a firewall but:

• Configure only the Crystal Management Server and the Input File Repository Server.
• Establish inbound firewall rules for communication between the Crystal Reports or Crystal Analysis machine and the CMS and Input File Repository Server. You do not need to establish an outbound firewall rule.

Related topics

• Command lines overview
• Changing the default server port numbers
• Configuring for Network Address Translation