[erlang-questions] Working around the Windows firewall

[Jeffrey Rennie]

Before I draft a formal EEP,

 

Windows firewall is enabled by default, and blocks sockets used by erlang.
Yes, exceptions can be added to the firewall, however, this is not possible
in some situations.  For example:

1.  A corporate network with strict policies that prohibit opening ports
used by erlang.

2.  An application written in erlang that installs without administrator
privileges.

3.  (A generalization of the above)  Whenever the user who wants to run
erlang is not an administrator.

 

In these environments, an alternative to sockets which get entangled in the
firewall, is Win32 named pipes which do not get entangled in  the firewall.

 

Therefore, I propose a change that will allow erlang nodes to communicate
over named pipes in addition to sockets.  Of course, it would be controlled
by command-line parameters.

 

I've spent a day browsing the erlang source code and it looks pretty doable.

 

Comments and questions please.

 

P.S. It took me about 5 hours to successfully build on Windows; I had most
of the tools like Visual Studio and cygwin installed.  I got tripped up by
git switching LFs to CRLFs, which chokes bash.  Also, it's much faster to
just run vcvars32.bat and then run bash than to write your own script that
sets the vc environment variables.

 

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