Help me troubleshoot WU transmission problem with Folding@Home

[Mr N8]

Here's the scenario - I've got 2 machines folding here at work and they are able to receive new projects, but are not transmitting the results. I have these machines going through a Squid Proxy to the internet, so I'm not sure if I have something set in there that's blocking the transmission. It's trying to transmit to 171.65.103.160:8080.

Does anyone have any ideas for how to get these WU's to tranmit? Otherwise, can I save the data to a thumb drive and transmit them from a different location? I can transmit off of my laptop whenever I take it home, but the other machine is a desktop, so that's not possible.

[mojo]

How are you using squid? Is on a box that you configured by hand just to be a web proxy? Is it incorporated into a firewall distro such as IPCop or Smoothwall? Are you running it in transparent mode so it handles all requests on port 80 (and apparently 8080) without end users being able to choose or do you configure client browsers to use the proxy explicitly?

Now that I've asked you 20 questions, how about some suggestions?
It could be that you just need to tell squid to pass those packets through with no questions asked. Check out this link. You'll need to create an ACL rule for that host and then use the always_direct command to pass traffic meeting the rule directly to the host.
http://www.visolve.com/squid/squid24...#always_direct
I'll warn you that I've never had good luck with this method.

If you're running squid in transparent by capturing traffic on ports 80/8080 with the iptables firewall and forcing those requests to go through squid, you may have to just bypass squid entirely to transmit the WUs.

Use
iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 8080 -d 171.65.103.160 -j ACCEPT

to bypass squid for all traffic to your remote host, or use

iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING -s localIP -j ACCEPT

to bypass squid for any traffic on any port for the 2 folding machines on your network. This last method seems to work best for me.

[Mr N8]

Mojo -

Basically, I have all users autheticating to the Squid Proxy, so that their internet usage can be monitored. Honestly, I'd dump the whole system if there was a better way, but I haven't had time to deal with that yet. I got this job 1 year ago and I've been busy getting the entire network into a more sensable configuration than it was in before I started here. It was mostly converted from a Novell to Windows 2003 network, but not entirely.

As far as I can tell, it's not running a firewall in conjunction with the Squid Proxy. It's on a Salckware 7.0 box and it forwards all accepted traffic to the router.

I'm more familiar with commercial firewalls / routers from Cisco and Netscreen. Can I enter the iptables command at the prompt in the CLI or is there a procedure for the iptables command?

[mojo]

You can enter the iptables command directly into the CLI, but you will have to do it every time you reboot/restart iptables. You can also enter it into the startup script for iptables, which would be the preferred method. It should be in /etc/rc.d. Probably rc.firewall or rc.firewall.local.

If the folding computer is doing just that and no people use it I would recommend the very last option, it seems to work best for me.

[mojo]

Did that work out for you?