Empathy's "People Nearby" feature doesn't work out of the box because
the required ports are blocked by default by the firewall
(
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=844308). It's a similar story with
Gnome's "Media Sharing" feature, and I'm sure there are lots of other
examples.
Now, if you're running a server and you install, say, Apache, I think you expect to
have to go and poke at the firewall config, but these seem to be very desktop-focused
features, and the UI provides no clue about the extra steps required.
The FirewallD wiki page talks about a proposed "user interaction mode"
(
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FirewallD#User_interaction_mode), which sounds like
it's intended to address these kinds of issues. I guess that's not going to be
with us soon?
Meanwhile, are there any quick ways we could simply this for users? It's not much,
but should application packages ship /usr/lib/firewalld/services/service.xml files so that
users can open the correct ports by ticking a box in firewall-config rather than having to
go hunting around to find the ranges?
--
Peter Oliver