Connecting machines without opening a port

Your other computers - a laptop, a Mac, a second desktop - connect to your Gateway so they can share the same sessions, and they do it without opening or forwarding a network port. This is not a setting you enable; it is how DevThrottle connects. Every machine reaches out on its own, and nothing on it sits listening.

How it works

The direction is always outward. The Director on each of your machines dials out to the Gateway and keeps that connection open; everything that reaches the machine - your phone answering a session, the Cockpit, another agent's command - comes back down the connection the machine itself opened. The Gateway never contacts your machines; it does not need to know how to.

Why it is better

• Simpler to set up. There is no port to open and no router forwarding rule to configure on any machine you connect. It reaches out on its own.
• Safer. A machine that never opens a port for an inbound connection has nothing extra exposed for someone else to find. The connection is started from the inside out.

The one listener in the whole system is a self-hosted Gateway's own port (7878), on the single machine you chose to run it on. With the hosted Gateway, no machine of yours listens on anything at all. (One brief exception, stated for honesty: during an interactive sign-in the Director opens a loopback listener to receive your browser's callback - it lasts as long as the sign-in and carries nothing an agent can call.)

A short history

Machines have connected across the network this way - outward, with no port to open - since the connection shipped in v1.1.0. What remained after that was local: the Director and the launcher each listened on a local network port of their own machine, and agents could reach the fleet two ways. v1.9.9 deleted both listeners - DevThrottle no longer opens a network port on your machine, and everything an agent does goes through the Gateway, one door, always. Leftovers from the listener era are cleaned up automatically the next time a Director starts.

Where to go next

For how the Gateway and your other devices fit together, read what the Gateway does. To connect and answer agents from a browser on one of those machines, see the Cockpit.