Fire Door! Common version 1.0beta1, 11 March 1996
Copyright ©1996 by Equivalence, equival@ozemail.com.au

Help on Global Parameters

Changing global parameters

The Global Parameters page allows you change parameters which affect the global operation of Fire Door

To change any of the parameters on this page, simply enter the new value into the appropiate field and press the "Accept" button. The new values will be installed and a new page will be displayed confirming that the new values have been added. At this point, use the "Back" button on your browser to return to the Global Parameters page.

Log Level

The Log Level parameter sets the threshold for system messages generated by Fire Door. Under Windows/NT, system messages are written to the Event Log. The default value is 2.

The Log Level parameter can be set a value between 0 and 3 inclusive. More messages are generated for higher values, and higher values include all messages generated by lower values

The types of messages included at each level are as follows:
0Fatal errors only
1All Errors
2Warnings
3All messages

NOTE: A Log Level value of 3 is normally used only for debugging. Using this value will substatially reduce the performance of Fire Door, and will generate a large volume of messages which may cause problems on some machines.

SOCKS Timeout

The SOCKS Timeout parameters sets the maximum period of time that Fire Door will wait to fullfill a SOCKS TCP Connect request. The default value of 10 seconds may have to be increased for congested networks, or if TCP communication is attempted with busy hosts that take a long time to respond.

Link Timeout

Fire Door continuously monitors all open TCP connections for actvity. Fire Door will close any TCP connection which has no activity for the the period of time set by the Link Timeout parameter. The default value for the Link Timeout parameter is 60 minutes.

NOTE: - some FTP and Telnet programs use a feature called "Keep Alive" which will prevent Fire Door from detecting inactive TCP connections. Be careful to ensure that this feature is not used if you wish inactive connections to be detected. "Keep Alives" will also prevent Fire Door from performing an automatic hang-up on a dialup connection when no activity is detected. See the Disconnect Time parameter on the Dialup Parameters screen for more information.

UDP Timeout

The UDP timeout parameter represents the maximum period of time Fire Door will wait for a reply to a UDP packet before resending it. The default value of 6 seconds may have to be increased for congested networks, or if UDP communication is attempted with busy hosts that take a long time to respond.

UDP Retries

The UDP Retries parameter represents the maximum number of times Fire Door will resend a UDP packets. The default value of 3 retries may have to be increased for congested networks.

HTTP Port

The HTTP Port parameter sets the port which Fire Door uses for it's programming interface. The default value is 1081.

NOTE - immediately after submitting a page which has a new value for the HTTP Port parameter, the Web browser being used will report that it is unable to connect to Fire Door. This is normal, and is caused by the fact that the HTTP port which was formally being used no longer exists. When this occurs, the port parameter in the URL being used by the browser must be changed to reflect the new port number.

Username and Password

The Username and Password fields allow you to control access to the Fire Door configuration screens. Without the password, only the Fire Door Home Page, and the Online Help pages, are accessible.

NOTE: - When using the Netscape Navigator browser to change the Fire Door password, it will be necessary to exit and re-run Netscape. This is because Netscape caches Basic Authentication realms and this is the only mechanism possible to flush the cache. Failure to do this will result in a "403 Forbidden" response when attempting to access the controlled screens after changing the password.