March 2007
Jim Scheef, Moderator
Lisa Leifels, Reporter

We welcome questions from the floor at the start of our General Meetings. In addition, members who are not able to attend the General Meeting may submit questions to askdacs@dacs.org. We will ask the question for you and post the reply in DACS.ORG. Please provide as much information as possible since we can’t probe during the session.

Q.  I have a Netgear wireless router and I’m looking for the correct port number to use with iChat.

A.  When using iChat AV with Network Address Translation (NAT) routers, certain ports must be open to allow video and audio conferencing behind a firewall.  Some devices have these ports open by default, while others require configuration.

You can go to the Apple website and find a list of routers that Apple considers iChat AV compatible.  No additional configuring or port forwarding is required on these routers.

NAT is a popular way of sharing an internet connection on a small network.  A small number of routers handle network traffic in such a way that they do not work with iChat AV.  When using one of these routers, you may see a network timeout or a user did not respond error message. Upgrading your router with the latest firmware may fix the problem.

Here are some other items to check.  Make sure that there is only one router between your computer and your Internet service provider.  Also ensure that a firewall has not been enabled on the sending or receiving end of the iChat conference.  Optional firewall features on routers and firewall software may block ports.

iChat uses a range of ports for different purposes.  The ports 16384 to 16403 are used for conferencing.  Port 5060 is used to initiate an iChat invitation and port 5678 is used for SNATMAP.  Different ports need to be open depending upon which firewall you are using, the Mac OS X or that from a third party.  Check the Apple website for the exact ports that need to be open for your configuration.

Q.  Charter is my ISP and I would like to use Microsoft Outlook with my wife’s AT&T Worldnet email address.  I am having trouble sending emails, I am getting a message that I can’t connect to the server.

A.  Some ISP’s do not let their customers send emails using a third party SMTP server.  If you are using an AT&T email address, you need to use their SMTP server, which is mailhost.att.net.  If you are using a Charter email address, then you need to use the SMTP server smtp.charter.net.

Submit any question to: askdacs@dacs.org.