How can I allow the Update Service to operate through a firewall?

The Tekla Structural Update Service will check to make sure that your Tekla Tedds and Tekla Structural Designer software is up to date but you may need to allow it to operate through your firewall.

Solution

There are two aspects to the Update Service - the first aspect is communication with our Update Service Server which holds the information about which updates are available for each version of the software. Secondly there is where the update files themselves are hosted.

Update Service Server

The Update Service Server is hosted on https://updates.tekla.com/ therefore your firewall needs to allow communicaton with this server.

Hosted files

In order to get the files to the client PC most efficiently Tekla Structural Update Service hosts the files on a Content Delivery Network, or CDN for short.

The CDN used is Amazon AWS Cloudfront and the domain that the files are served from is https://dist.download.tekla.com. Because of the nature of a CDN and there being multiple servers around the globe it is not possible to give specific IPs. In addition the IPs of Amazons servers change, however, Amazon do publish a list of their CloudFront IP ranges which can be used as a reference to the current servers and could be added to the firewalls whitelist.