Re: Windows Messenger behind Firewalls and Routers

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Date: Sun, 23 May 2004 21:09:20 +0100

In message <eGI531LQEHA.3944@tk2msftngp13.phx.gbl>, bjrugg
<bjrugg@remove.hotmail.com> writes
>I am trying to set up video and voice on Messenger 4.7 for my wife to use
>with a friend in the Netherlands. The Holland friend has a Dell wireless g
>router connected to local DSL and has recently purchased several Dell
>laptops with Windows XP Home running Norton Firewall.
>I have a Netgear 614 (UPNP on) wireless router with cable modem and a wired
>Athlon 1700 (UPNP Loaded)running a Kerio firewall.
>
>The chat works fine, but I want to use the webcam (Intel cs110) to do video
>and voice.
>Does your following article apply or is this task mission impossible (
>Punching holes in the firewall as noted in the article? Do you need UPNP on
>with both machines?)
>http://messenger.jonathankay.com/problem.aspx?ID=16

I've been frequenting this newsgroup for ages with a particular similar
problem, which now I appear to have sorted.

My answer would be - Yes you need UPnP on the routers at both ends.
But... I could never get a Netgear DG-834 router to UPnP properly even
after 3 months with support and being escalated to the highest level. It
worked with one machine but with no others of mine.

A D-Link DSLG-604T router did work with all machines but was unstable.
The first firmware upgrade released about a week ago appears to have
made it much more stable and it now seems to be working fine with UPnP.
However, I did have some weird effects with a couple of cheap pcmcia
wi-fi cards, Binatone WL1000's. These worked fine until I fired up any
other wi-fi kit in the area, and then they would go into a
connect/disconnect rhythm at about once per second. A call to support
revealed that the firmware on the support website was out of date and
that there was a hidden ftp site which had a much later version.
Upgrading to this cured these problems.

It is possible that the card problems might have been related to the
Netgear problems, but I returned the latter, so now I'll never know.

It seems to me that all this stuff is being sold before it is reasonably
well debugged, and it is incredibly difficult to get any solid
information about testing methods and so on.

I started this because my son asked me to set up my little network to
exchange video and audio with a view to then researching the security
dangers relating to UPnP, and then trying to manage them.

It has been embarrassing in the extreme that I haven't been able to even
begin to look at the security aspects because I couldn't get the basic
Windows XP Messenger to work.

This may not be the place to say this, but I am also quite disgusted
that Microsoft can sell IBM a non-transferable licence tied to a
particular machine, and include, as part of the OS, XP Messenger which
both Microsoft ("it's the OEM provider's responsibility") and IBM ("It's
a usability feature not covered by the support contract") will not
support.

My advice would be to be very wary of opening all those ports as in the
Jonathan Kay article. It didn't work here with the hardware that I had
at the time. Jonathan does a wonderful job in this newsgroup, but he
does seem to be fighting a rather immature technology.

-- 
Bill

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