Last week, Pure Networks released an alpha version of Port Magic on the web. We got a lot of positive feedback for the problem we’re trying to solve: automatically open ports on an Internet gateway when a user plays or hosts an online game. Modern Internet gateways (LinkSys, Dlink, Netgear, etc.) all interact with the user using a web interface. To configure your Internet Gateway, you type in http://192.168.168.1/ into your web browser. Since the UI is based on HTML, the Internet Gateway vendor has very few tools to work with to design good UI (wizards, state storage, controls). Most of the configuration UI is simple HTML controls they have a 1:1 correspondence with a setting in the gateway.
Port Magic automates the population of the port range forwarding dialog of a LinkSys Internet Gateway. We chose to use the http protocols over UPnP because using http works across all versions of the LinkSys Internet Gateway. We caught some heat from a couple of UPnP zealots on the forums for picking http over UPnP. We’re not anti-UPnP or trying to develop a competing protocol. We set out to solve this customer problem of automatically opening and closing ports when I launch and close an online application.
