Yes2Chess

National developments, strategies and ideas.
Andrew Martin
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Re: Yes2Chess

Post by Andrew Martin » Wed Mar 12, 2014 7:09 pm

In other words, it's complicated.

Paul McKeown
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Re: Yes2Chess

Post by Paul McKeown » Wed Mar 12, 2014 7:23 pm

Andrew Martin wrote:In other words, it's complicated.
No, not at all. But it does need the school or local authority to provide competent staff to do the necessary. The project might not be top of the priority list, so you might get someone who doesn't know what to do and will keep on doing it until you give up.

Paul McKeown
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Re: Yes2Chess

Post by Paul McKeown » Wed Mar 12, 2014 7:32 pm

Bear in mind that you will need administrator access to the PCs concerned in order to install the software.

Other possible issues are:

a) you may find it gets installed in incompatible directories or discs
b) you may find that user context data should be stored on a remote server, but gets created locally.

In that case, yes, it might be complicated to resolve.

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Carl Hibbard
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Re: Yes2Chess

Post by Carl Hibbard » Wed Mar 12, 2014 7:44 pm

I doubt it is port 23 telnet, that would be very bad.
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Andrew Martin
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Re: Yes2Chess

Post by Andrew Martin » Wed Mar 12, 2014 8:05 pm

I know that I am nowhere near competent enough to handle this type of issue, so thanks for the advice.

Nor can I ever get near a school firewall; it's all handled by the admins, so you are at their mercy.

Looking at the yes2chess Twitter feed,they publish results from matches in Germany; clearly it is less of a problem there.

Paul McKeown
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Re: Yes2Chess

Post by Paul McKeown » Wed Mar 12, 2014 9:05 pm

Andy, my comment wasn't directed at you. It isn't your job, after all. My comment was directed at the school or local authority. As you say, you are at the mercy of the admins.

Jonathan Bryant
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Re: Yes2Chess

Post by Jonathan Bryant » Thu Mar 13, 2014 9:56 am

I’ve had two different non-chessers forward me emails that they’ve received from Barclaycard encouraging them to get schools to sign up to this scheme. Obviously the word is getting out there.

Could somebody explain to a technical idiot what the problem is? What are these ports and what do they do?

Am I right in thinking that school computers are typically set up to block the kind of server upon which Yes2Chess relies? Perhaps because it’s considered a social media site or something?

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John Upham
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Re: Yes2Chess

Post by John Upham » Thu Mar 13, 2014 11:12 am

We had this problem a few years ago attempting to use playchess.com (and maybe Chesscube?) to allow school teams to play each other.

As well as using port 80 (http) or 443 (https) playchess.com used a prviledged TCP/IP port below 1024 as well as some non-priviledged ports above 1024.

LEA firewalls tend to have very few ports open (such as 21, 23, 25, 80 and 443) and the default is for the rest to be closed.

We tried our best but could not speak to the right people to get them open and therefore we could not use the playchess.com platform in schools.

I did advise ChessCube that if they wanted to offer their platform to schools in the UK then they would have to use port 80/443 and assume nothing else would be available.

Hopefully Yes2Chess will not suffer from similar barriers.
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Andrew Martin
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Re: Yes2Chess

Post by Andrew Martin » Thu Mar 13, 2014 12:13 pm

As no propaganda is being put forward about the number of English schools entered and matches being played it is clear that there is an issue so far, which most vexingly looks like the SAME issue we encountered nine years ago. The set up must be made as simple as humanly possible for schools to be able to accept it .
Last edited by Andrew Martin on Thu Mar 13, 2014 12:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Roger de Coverly
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Re: Yes2Chess

Post by Roger de Coverly » Thu Mar 13, 2014 12:34 pm

Andrew Martin wrote:As no propaganda is being put forward about the number of English schools entered and matches being played it is clear that there is an issue so far. It must be made as simple as humanly possible for schools to be able to accept it .
I've long thought that an approach to getting younger players to play chess seriously was to introduce them to an account on a server and let them practice endlessly in their own time. Doing this on school computers is likely to be an uphill struggle because of school risk aversion. At secondary level, you could perhaps do this through unofficial channels by getting the school hackers to unlock whatever was needed.

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John Upham
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Re: Yes2Chess

Post by John Upham » Thu Mar 13, 2014 1:10 pm

Roger de Coverly wrote: At secondary level, you could perhaps do this through unofficial channels by getting the school hackers to unlock whatever was needed.
I am sure you would make a good role model amongst secondary school chess club providers with this suggestion.

"School / LEA firewall hacked by chess club pupils"

The chances of a secondary school pupil being able to reconfigure an LEA firewall configuration to play on-line chess whilst at school are somewhat slim.

What would be your line of attack: determine the IP address of outgoing packets by using tcpdump / IP sniffer (or similar) or perhaps port scan 192.168.0.1 upwards until you find suitable listening ports on the firewall / router?
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Roger de Coverly
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Re: Yes2Chess

Post by Roger de Coverly » Thu Mar 13, 2014 1:36 pm

John Upham wrote: The chances of a secondary school pupil being able to reconfigure an LEA firewall configuration to play on-line chess whilst at school are somewhat slim.
If you cannot get through, go round. Use a mobile phone connection as an pass-through and directly connect by wireless. It's the approach you can use in a hotel to get a connection without using the hotel's network. If school computers are protected at an individual level or you aren't even allowed to switch on a non-school computer, that isn't going to work.

Andrew Martin
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Re: Yes2Chess

Post by Andrew Martin » Thu Mar 13, 2014 1:44 pm

I wonder how Carl will feel about GCHQ monitoring the English Chess Forum?

PeterFarr
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Re: Yes2Chess

Post by PeterFarr » Thu Mar 13, 2014 4:00 pm

Andrew Martin wrote:I wonder how Carl will feel about GCHQ monitoring the English Chess Forum?
Plenty of chess-players at GCHQ; a tradition going back to Alexander, Milner-Barry and co..

Roger de Coverly
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Re: Yes2Chess

Post by Roger de Coverly » Thu Mar 13, 2014 4:35 pm

Andrew Martin wrote:I wonder how Carl will feel about GCHQ monitoring the English Chess Forum?
The idea that if you cannot get an internet connection, you take your own, is one I would attribute to Sean Hewitt on this forum. He was commenting on the inability of the Staunton tournaments at Simpsons to provide live game coverage where they cited the absence of a suitable network in the building. His then solution was a 3G dongle, which are still available but obsolete as a separate device if you can get your phone to do the same job.

There's a story that GCHQ once looked at postal games to see if an alleged mole was using them to communicate with the Soviet Union, the conclusion being that the standard of play was too high. Games between juniors would however be a good cover for sequences random at chess but otherwise meaningful as a code.