BusinessObjects Enterprise Administrator's Guide

Configuring for SOCKS servers

Note:    Business Objects will be moving away from supporting SOCKS proxy servers. As a result SOCKS proxy servers are still supported in BusinessObjects Enterprise XI. SOCKS proxy servers will be deprecated in a future release of BusinessObjects Enterprise. If you are using SOCKS proxy servers now, we recommend you switch to a different firewall method.

BusinessObjects Enterprise provides direct support for SOCKS proxy server firewalls on Windows installations that use the BusinessObjects Enterprise .NET SDK.

There is limited support of SOCKS for the UNIX installation of BusinessObjects Enterprise, or for a Windows installation that uses the BusinessObjects Enterprise Java SDK. You can configure the Web Component Adapter to communicate through a SOCKS server, but the Java SDK has no support for SOCKS. Therefore you may be able to configure your system to support a custom CSP application and SOCKS, but you cannot use JSP pages through a SOCKS firewall.

Note:    The EBUS layer of the Java SDK does not support communications using the SOCKs protocol. The means that applications written using the Java SDK cannot be on the outside of a firewall from any components that must be accessed, if the only means of traversing the firewall is using the SOCKs protocol. Therefore only perform the test cases that utilize socks when using IIS on a windows deployment

This list describes when to use the procedures that are provided in the remainder of this section:

• Configuring the CMS for SOCKS Servers

  Complete these steps if one or more SOCKS servers separate the WCA from the CMS.

• Configuring the WCA for SOCKS servers

  When configuring your WCA for SOCKS, complete these steps regardless of the location of your SOCKS server(s).

BusinessObjects Enterprise requires that the CMS and the remaining server components are not separated from one another by firewalls. The remaining server components automatically obtain their SOCKS configuration from the CMS, as required, so you don't need to configure them separately.