April 16, 2005

Firewall settings for iChat AV

Bertrand is currently giving an XML/Cocoon training in a swiss school, and proposed me to give a short videoconferencing talk to explain students what we're doing with Cocoon. That was the pretext he was waiting for to finally buy an iSight :-)

Entering now the firewall configuration problem... To use iChat AV, one of the two ends must accept incoming connections on an number of ports.

The Apple website gives some information about it but this isn't so clear about what ports are used for LAN chat or WAN chat and ends up with "If that does not work, try opening all ports in this range: 1024-65535". Yeah, sure...

So for your convenience, here are the required incoming ports and what they're used for (thanks to this page):
  • 5060 - UDP: SIP (Session Initiation Protocol)
  • 5190 - TCP & UDP: AIM/iChat file transfert
  • 5678 - UDP: SNATMAP server (what's that?)
  • 16384-16403 - UDP: RTP/RTCP (Real-Time Transport Protocol)

Posted by Sylvain Wallez at April 16, 2005 10:47 AM
Comments

Looks a bit like M$ Protocols. I don't understand why so many vendors use always a couple of ports instand a well defined protocol on one or two ports.

Posted by: leo on April 17, 2005 04:45 PM

Apparently snatmap.mac.com is used to work around NAT or firewalls. Search the words "With formatting"in http://macslash.org/article.pl?sid=03/06/23/2222248

Posted by: Bertrand Delacretaz on April 20, 2005 10:09 PM

I am using a Linksys WRT54G v1.1 Wireless router on a 3 Mac and two PC setup (DHCP) and I can't get my iChat AV to work specially with my iSight? Ca anyone help me with the set-up/configuration please? I am totally clueless when it comes to this. Thanks.

JDennis

Posted by: J.Dennis Arceo on June 23, 2005 12:30 PM

I think you meant to say 5678, NOT 5679 for SNATMAP.

Posted by: N White on June 26, 2005 12:29 AM

You're right. Fixed, thanks for reporting!

Posted by: Sylvain Wallez on June 26, 2005 03:49 PM