New site port number proxy issue

[toulouse]

Ben,

Have been reading since very early on. Said nothing. But enjoying it very much, both the historical sweep, and your personal comic idiom. I so dig the onomatopoeia.


And, hey, I dig the new site! But why use such a left field TCP port of 1701? Will you be changing to the standard of port 80, or is that permanent?

Using a nonstandard port is likely to keep people behind highly restrictive firewalls (of corporate and other oppressors) from being able to view the site. My employer strictly limits the outbobund ports we can view so I won't be able to read it at work. And it breaks the convention of websites being on port 80.


thanks again for hours of enjoyment

2loose

[bencosta]

Hey 2loose,

Thanks for reading and sticking with the comic.

To answer your question (kind of), my friend has been coding everything for the website, and chose to use that port for I don't
know what reason, but he says there's a backstory, and that it works slightly faster through 1701. But anyway, I told him about
it and he changed it to port 80.

Long live reading webcomics at work!

[Elliot]

Hello!

Thanks for your feedback!

The short answer is that the software we're using to make the new site is easier to run as its own web server service. The server machine already has a standard HTTP daemon running on port 80, so we had to put the Pang server daemon on an unreserved port, and 1701 is a Star Trek reference.

The standard web service on port 80 is now proxying port 1701, so you should be able to access the site as normal. The proxy delay should be imperceptible practically speaking, at least relative to the time it takes to download the comic pages. But in the background the service on port 80 is just relaying the requests to 1701 and then relaying the responses.

Hope this was informative!

- Elliot (tech support)