Trailhead Components and Connections

Trailhead is made up of two software components: the Trailhead server, which resides outside the corporate firewall, and the Trailhead medium, which resides inside the firewall on the Media Blender machine. Each component is configured using a Trailhead.properties file.

The Trailhead server and the Trailhead medium communicate with each other using connections. Outside the firewall, Trailhead's connections query whether the Trailhead media inside the firewall can route calls. Inside the firewall, the Trailhead medium's connections query Trailhead for any alerts and statistics.

The Trailhead medium can be set up to perform two functions:

Note that you can set up a Trailhead medium to perform either or both of these tasks.

About Trailhead connections

The Trailhead server and the Trailhead medium communicate with each other through the corporate firewall. To accommodate this, the Trailhead connection uses the Sun Microsystems Remote Method Invocation (RMI). With such a connection, an RMI registry exists on both sides of the firewall. Each registry identifies its machine to the machine on the other side of the firewall.

When defining Trailhead connections, you need to define your connections in property files on both the Trailhead medium and the Trailhead server. The properties files are:

Each connection registers at its registry port using its local server name. The connection accepts incoming requests that are made to its registry port, as long the request provides the password (local password) to the server.

For one side of the RMI connection to connect to the other side, it needs to know the hostname and/or IP address, the port, and server name to request and the password to provide. You can set these on each side of the firewall using Trailhead.properties (for the Trailhead medium) and Trailhead.server.properties (for the Trailhead server.) The following image illustrates the properties used on both sides of the firewall to identify the RMI connection:

 

For complete information on each of these properties, see Configuration file reference