issues with gather.town blocked by Checkpoint

[Chris_PDI]

Hi there,

I am sorry in advance that I probably won't put this topic in the right subsection. Our institute is using gather.town for their monthly meetings on a regular basis. Until November 23rd last year everything worked well and smooth. But our December meeting wasn't possible anymore because our Checkpoint Firewall is blocking the whole video/audio-traffic to and from gather except for the PCs who are authorized to access the firewall management.

After contacting gather.town they suggested to open up nearly all ports for thousands of IPs which clearly isn't a viable solution. Has anyone similar issues with gather.town or do I miss something crucial?

We're using devices from the Checkpoint 4000 family if it might help.
I'm sorry if I forgot to provide crucial information, but it's the first time I am working with CheckPoint 😅

[_Val_]

Do you have a local partner who can help you? It seems you just need someone who can fix this for you, and probably perform some knowledge transfer on the way too

[Chris_PDI]

yes, we have a service partner but we weren't successful fixing the issue. We followed the advice from gather support and opened all ports according to this help: https://support.gather.town/help/vpn-firewall but it didn't work. Now gather gave us the IPs of their service provider, which are again thousands of ports for thousands of IPs to be constantly open. The main issue I don't understand, how it's possible that from one month to the other the traffic from and to gather.town is blocked by the CheckPoint firewall?

[_Val_]

Something changed either on your FW, or on the application side. Without any substantial information, it is hard to guess. If you still have the logs from back then, you may compare them with current situation. 

Did you look into security logs?

[Chris_PDI]

the weird thing is, now it's working again. I asked a view colleagues to login into gather.town to create some logs and now everything is apparently working and I am even more confused. 😵

My guess is that gather did something on their side. I asked our senior admin, if he changed something - nothing. Even the firewall-rule, which we used for testing the gather-suggestion, is not active. I really don't get it.

[the_rock]

Well, dont open bunch of ports to so many IP addresses, that does not sound like a good solution at all. Can you check the logs to see exactly why its being blocked? Is there a rule blocking it, application, IPS?

Andy

[Chris_PDI]

no, we won't do that, that's for sure, but at the moment it's working again and we have no clue how and why,