iChat and Eircom

culabula

I have noticed that everytime I try to make a video call with ichat to friends in the Republic who are joined at the hip to Eircom and Netopia routers that it fails. I make successful calls everywhere else -Japan, USA, France- and to people in Galway for example, who are with NTL. I believe the problem lies therefore with these routers and have attempted to configure them remotely for my friends but have got nowhere. Can anyone throw some light on this? It also means that all other linked services such as screen sharing fail too.

nialler

1. You'll need to open the relevant ports for iChat and Remote Desktop

2. You'll need to assign static ip addresses to your friends macs

3. You'll need to create routes (port forwarding) to those static ip addresses.

That should sort you out.

duffman85

PortForwarding.com is always useful for these things.

The first link below is for the Netopia 224NWG-VGX,but the instructions should be fairly similar the other netopia routers.

http://www.portforward.com/english/routers/port_forwarding/Netopia/2247NWG-VGx/iChat.htm

The list of routers is at http://www.portforward.com/english/routers/port_forwarding/routerindex.htm

culabula

Thanks for this, I'll have a look. When I looked in the router's settings I couldn't see much by way of adjusting these things -it's quite apparent on my own router at home but there isn't really very much to fiddle with in the Netopia.. In addition one lady's firewall is completely off so I don't understand why this is made so difficult. Macs allow all incoming connections if you let them and this shouldn't really be necessary.

heggie

you need to turn on the expert mode i think

aidan_walsh

Macs allow all incoming connections if you let them

Macs do, but inbuilt router firewalls may not depending on their configuration.

culabula

aidan_walsh wrote: »

Macs do, but inbuilt router firewalls may not depending on their configuration.

Yes but the router's firewall is totally set to off.

Anyway, I discovered last night that -bizarrely- her Mac does nor have a local IP but is instead showing the external IP and hence all the problems. It's a new one on me and I will just have to travel to Cork.

finkie_vandyke

Hi lads,
i have had this problem with eircom and ichat and thanks to this thread of yours it now works.
I switched the router's firewall down to 'Low' which seems to permit NAT. and then went into expert mode on the routers configuration menu - http://192.168.1.254

At that stage i went to configure->wireless-NAT and changed the settings as you suggested from this link (http://www.portforward.com/english/routers/port_forwarding/Netopia/2247NWG-VGx/iChat.htm)

That said as a sanity check you can find the port settings for your particular OS setup here on Apple's page - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1507?viewlocale=en_US

At this stage you then add the 12 or so services - yes one for each port number tcp and udp and make sure you assign it to the correct machine on the network. for those of you with only one machine in the house this will be the default machine but in my case i was configuring the router from a different laptop (and old reliable Thinkpad) and had to make sure I assigned the service to the identified Macbook and not the thinkpad. iChat then worked perfectly.
Anyway thanks a mil for that help, I was floored initially.

su_dios

I've always wondered why I have such bad icaht reception. What port does ichat use?

Also I use dynamic IP addressing and I don't really want to mess around too much as I've quite a few devices set up working properly on it. Can I change this easily? Is there any need to change it? ... Can I get this working with dynamic addressing? Its a bit of a pain for torrents etc with portmapping on dynamic IPs

finkie_vandyke

Hmm if your ichat suffers from poor reception i am not sure if what I had posted above is related. My issue was getting ichat to be able to communicate in the first place. The wireless routers was essentially not facilitating packets with the ichat port numbers in them so that traffic simply was not getting through - its a NAT thing. its not like they half get through or anything that might cause bad reception.
In your case:
It might be that if your upload bandwidth is low as it would be with Eircom then the video of yourself and your audio being sent to the person you are communicating with will be low quality. If the person you are chatting to is also using a broadband with a poor upload bandwidth then the video/audio they are sending you will be poor quality. Try ichatting with someone you know on a big fat corporate/campus network and see if your repception improves. If it does n't then it looks like the problem is on your side.