The Great Tree

brian · Posted: Sat Dec 27, 2003 2:12 pm Post subject: Ups and Downs...

Another thing I should mention is that the forum has been up and down a lot lately... there's a good reason for this Smile

I've been experimenting with Voice Chat on MSN lately and it seems that my FreeBSD NAT/Firewall setup doesn't like voice chat direct connections... I've been experimenting with Socks5 servers and other socksifying efforts, but... no luck so far... which means I have to tear down my network and direct connect.

If anyone has any good solutions for this, feel free to post them here.
_________________
#Brian Fioca
#KI: 11882331
#KI: 1504111 [disconnected]

Kev · Posted: Sat Dec 27, 2003 6:25 pm Post subject:

Hey Brian,

I too had lots of trouble trying to voice chat (we should blame her computer for the problems Wink

). Anyway, I was determined not to tear up my network and I finally got it to work behind my router. However, I had to open up my network like swiss cheese for it to work. Seems MSN voice chat uses loose UDP, and allocates its ports from the pool 5004 - 65535 (UDP) (this is true for at least Windows Messenger 4).

I scowered the web and found some port assignments for MSN:

Port Range / Protocol
1863-1863 Both
5190-5190 UDP
6891-6900 TCP
6901-6901 Both
5004-65535 UDP (these are for voice)

I forwarded these ports to my IP and I was able to make the voice chat connection. Then when I'm done voice chatting, I just "unforward" these ports. In the windows environment, you may need to have the UPnP client installed from Windows Components -> Networking Services. Not sure how/if FreeBSD handles UPnP, though.

If this doesn't work, there's a little program called ENat Voice that sits on top of MSN. You may want to try that although it's shareware w/ a 21 day trial. When first launched the program will tell you if it's even possible to run voice chat on top of your NAT device--can be handy.

Good luck. E-mail me or catch me on AIM or MSN if I can help.

-Kevin (Kev)

brian · Posted: Sat Dec 27, 2003 7:05 pm Post subject:

Cool, thanks for all the info...

I've arrived at the same conclusions... only thing I haven't tried is the UPnP, i'll have to go do that. Enat didn't work, because FreeBSD doesn't support looseUDP... maybe I'll just have to get a hardware router...
_________________
#Brian Fioca
#KI: 11882331
#KI: 1504111 [disconnected]

brian · Posted: Sat Dec 27, 2003 9:53 pm Post subject:

thanks Kev!

I just installed upnpd for FreeBSD and now MSN says I'm connected through a UPnP symetric NAT... that should fix all my problems... I'll have to test it later.
_________________
#Brian Fioca
#KI: 11882331
#KI: 1504111 [disconnected]

Kev · Posted: Sun Dec 28, 2003 4:20 pm Post subject:

No problem! Glad I could help.

-Kevin