High Performance Comet on a Shoestring

I’ve had my eye on the advances that are being made in the Comet arena for a while now, but it was only this past weekend that I finally sat down and used it for a project. In doing so, there was a particular configuration problem I needed to address, and that was…uh, addressing.

Introducing Comet to an existing architecture assumes there is already a web server in the neighborhood, and that it is, in one way or another, receiving traffic from port 80. Due to the fact that many site visitors will likely be positioned behind a firewall unwilling to accept connections on ports other than 80 or 443, we also need to get our Comet server running on port 80 as well. This normally wouldn’t be much of a problem at all, unless you don’t want to fork over the money for an extra IP address. I don’t & I didn’t. So let me show you how I did so.