[lug] Software demo through firewalls?

[Glenn Murray]

Hi,

This gets around to being a Linux topic about half-way down.

We wish to demo our (soon to be open source) software in real time.
We'd like our clients to see and hear it.  We have no budget, really.
We can do the hearing part with a conference call, if necessary.

Given that the clients are behind corporate firewalls, is this
physically possible?  All of them have web browsers, but we will
probably not be able to ask them to install any software.  Is
"streaming video" a way to do this?

I've been looking into using VNC for the seeing part.

VNC uses rfb protocol.  Clients can access a server directly on
(default) port 5900 using a VNC viewer, or they can browse to port
5800 where a VNC mini-web server downloads a Java applet which acts as
a viewer.

With the help of Peter Hutnick of this list (thanks!) I have been able
to run VNC via x0rfbserver on port 80.  (That's the Linux part!) I was
thinking that I would have more luck being accessible from behind a
firewall when running on port 80 than on another port---or is this
naive?  My question is really for network administrators who set up
firewalls: what is the best way to accomplish what I am trying to do?

Thanks,
Glenn Murray
http://www.mines.edu/~gmurray