assigning a designated port for data routed out

[Cynthia Briscoe]

❓ We are trying to establish communication between a physician practice system and our interface engine for routing lab results.  When setting up this thread I have the port and IP address the vendor gave for routing purposes but there is no place to indicate a specific port that the engine will be sending the data through.  As it is the physician office system is set up to listen on a specific port for anything coming from the interface engine ip address.  We would like to narrow it down to a specific port on the engine as well.  How is that done?  I know I am probably not articulating this well but our network engineers do not want this “wide open” for whatever port is available at the time of the send.

Topic

[Jim Kosloskey]

Is this TCP/IP?

If so does specifying the specific port in the Thread Configuration TCP/IP (or TCP PDL) not work for you?

email: jim.kosloskey@jim-kosloskey.com 29+ years Cloverleaf, 59 years IT - old fart.

[Chris Williams]

If the physician practice system is, as you say, “listening” (acting as server) then they establish the port number on their system and you connect to it. You do NOT select the port your system (acting as client) will use. It is chosen automatically by the operating system from it’s range of “ephemeral ports” each time the connection is made. Your network engineers will want to allow ports in the ephemeral range for the box that Cloverleaf is running on.

If you are absolutely required to specify a single port on the Cloverleaf box for your connection,  then you will have to act as server, not client.

[Daniel DeLoach]

I have noticed this also, and it is kind of a bummer. In my previous life with another engine (left unnamed) it was possible to specify the local (ie, engine) and remote (ie, other system) ports. In this way you could specify not only what port you wanted to send out on from the engine box, but also the port data coming in had to be coming from, and not just to.

Granted this was often a meaningless distinction (or security overkill), but in our organization there were times when we had do deal with remote/external sites and this was a handy feature to have with regards to firewalls/security. Certainly perhaps an “enhancement” for a future version?  I guess maybe it would be possible to do this via a PDL (?), but that’s some extra-techy work for something that could be *easy*.

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