Sometimes it works..
.. and sometimes it doesn't. Connections
problems with iChat
Today, during my weekly video-conference call to the
UK, iChat stopped working. In fact, it stopped working before my weekly call -
it just wouldn't connect. The other party was told I wasn't responding, and I
was told the other party wasn't responding. And yet the exact same set-up worked
perfectly the previous weekend. Neither network had changed, but iChat stopped
working.
Obviously,
something,
somewhere
must have changed, so it was time to experiment. The "not responding" part made
me think of a router not forwarding information to certain ports, so I set my
home network router to put my iMac in a DMZ - in other words, the router would
pass everything no matter what. I then talked the other party into doing the
same.
No
difference.
Then I tried limiting the
bandwidth, audio-only calls, turning off the Mac OSX Firewall - you name it, I
tried it.
Disappointed at this stage, I
warned them to disable their DMZ setting before switching off, and amazingly
they decided to try once more to establish a connection and boom! - it
worked.
I can't see any logic to this,
other than maybe a bug in the router (a Linksys WAG54G) that needs an option
changed to reset itself, but anyway, it worked. Maybe if you are having problems
connecting, turn on and off the DMZ options on your router and hope for the
best.
Also, keep your eyes peeled for
the next Mac OS update to 10.4.2. Rumour sites have this one down for a hefty
update that includes serious enhancements to iChat as well as other general OS
features. It should be out very soon. Perhaps even this coming
week.
Let's hope it improves the
connection reliability with petulant routers.
Posted: Sun - June 12, 2005 at 01:21 PM