click2try.com Network Connectivity

To confirm that you can run click2try.com applications, visit http://www.click2try.com/connectiontest.html.

Introducing click2try.com

click2try.com is a community web site where its easy to try ready-to-use open source software for free. At click2try.com you can, right from your desktop, run pre-configured, fully-functional software applications installed on your own private virtual machine.

click2try Network Architecture

At click2try.com, we are committed to the privacy and security of our customers’ information and computer systems. Using SSH tunnels, we encrypt all traffic between a customer's client and private virtual machine (PVM). Unless otherwise requested, a customer's PVM resides inside our own secured network, and is not directly accessible by others through the Internet. The PVM is only accessible through the tunnels that we create.

click2try and SSH tunnels

We use SSH tunneling to provide the many interfaces required by the applications we host. Many of our PVMs require a Linux desktop that we make available using VNC. We also provide a command line interface to the PVM using an SSH terminal for administration purposes. Some of the applications require multiple HTTP interfaces or even proprietary interfaces on non-standard ports. For example, OpenERP uses port 9000 as its default HTTP interface port. Our viewer will load an SSH applet and a VNC applet inside a signed Java archive (jar) file.  Other types of communication are performed through the standard browser over an HTTP connection.

Basic connectivity requirements

Most public, home, and small business networks do not block outbound connections to Internet services.  In these environments the click2try service should function normally without any firewall changes. By default, click2try uses port 5958 to create an SSH connection to one of our gateway servers.  These servers are on the following IP network:

38.114.204.0/24

If we cannot create a connection on port 5958 we will then try the common port 8200, followed by port 80. If we are still unable to connect, we then attempt to connect with to an HTTP proxy over port 443 and create an SSH tunnel over that connection. While this technique works, you may experience a slight performance degradation vs. a direct SSH connection to one of the other ports.

To confirm that you can run click2try.com applications, visit http://www.click2try.com/connectiontest.html to use our connection test application.