Why does photon try to access 65.52.147.60:80 ?

lazalong
edited June 2011 in Any Topic & Chat
Hey

My firewall alerts me that each time I launch Photon "as an application"
it tries to contact several times 65.52.147.60:80 which is a Microsoft site.

I noticed that it tries to contact as many time as there are Applications listed in the PhotonServer.config. And effectively if I removed them from the .config file Photon will not contact Microsoft.

So my questions are the following:

- How to avoid this behaviour (apart of setting my firewall to block it) ?
- Is this something in the photon server code? If yes what does it send to Microsoft?
- Or in the .Net code itself (aka in the compiled application)?
- Or because I use the Visual C# Express version? (Although I never have this when I compile/run my own programs)

Regards

Comments

  • At startup and after that every hour Photon verifies the license you have with an Exit Games license server (LS).

    To provide the best uptime of the LS we provide several servers hosted with leading cloud providers:
    1) Google App Engine: http://code.google.com/appengine/
    2) Microsoft Azure: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/

    In your case Photon connects with #2. See you log file (Photon-Instance1-*) that the license was verified:
    3360: 09:29:33.657 - License is valid.
    3360: 09:29:33.657 - Licensed for 100 concurrent connections.
    

    To your questions:
    - How to avoid this behaviour (apart of setting my firewall to block it) ?
    A license server is the only way for us to verify. We have the option to hard code a fixed IP - but the is very inconvenient.
    - Is this something in the photon server code? If yes what does it send to Microsoft?
    We only verify the license itself. No application specific data is sent.
  • I see. I would have thought an in-build license would have been sufficient :)

    Btw until now I blocked the outgoing calls and the server seems to work fine...
  • There are two separate connections made: One to count the start and one to verify a floating license (which are not bound to a machine or a fixed, public IP).
    Maybe you blocked the start counter, which is of course not essential to start. This would match the port 80 you found.