AIM XP iChat OS X: SOLUTION to the you see me, but I can't see U (7:16pm EST Thu Nov 18 2004)
The "missing link" solution to getting AIM to work between MacOS X and Windows XP users (aside from having the right camera, XP patch installed, etc). I did disable my host-based firewall but left my perimeter (Netgear) firewall in place. When I get some time, I'll test out turning on my host-based Mac firewall, but check the "permit iChat".
Mac users open up the following ports on your perimeter firewall (I was missing the first two rows of ports, but haven't tested whether it works with any individual one of them blocked):
80 TCP and UDP (both, but for some firwalls, you can't specify)
21->23 TCP (21, 22, 23: careful, this is FTP, SSH, & Telnet)
5060 UDP
5190 TCP and UDP (both)
5297,5298 TCP and UDP (both)
5353 UDP
5678 UDP
16384->16403 UDP
I'm not sure why FTP, SSH, and Telnet are specified. When I get a chance, I'll test blocking some of those to see the impact...or maybe I'll sniff the traffic to see if they're really in use or not.
At any rate, it allows XP users to connect to OS X iChat users. I have noticed a hang sometimes when iChat initiates the connection and after XP accepts, so not sure why it does that. It might be the case that the XP user has to open up some ports too...but if I recall correctly, later attempts don't hang.
Another weird quirk is that sometimes the video will freeze, but the audio will continue to work. I have to disconnect from the session and reconnect to get the video back. This is one of those later attempts that I was talking about.
I believe the XP users (the two that I have tried it with) did not have to make any firwall modifications on their end. Now if you are doing iChat to iChat, you don't have to make any FW mods either.
With iChat, the default window size is 3 inches by 3.5 inches and you can resize it to be the whole screen if you want. With AIM for XP, you're stuck with a one inch by 1.5 inch window. iChat is definately far superior. AND with iChat for Tiger (MacOS 10.4), there will be the ability to do multi-party chats and 30 frames per second (fps) (iChat-iChat max is 15fps, with iChat-XP 10-12fps). I think they get their higher fps from using compression. Of course, that might be a single user on a LAN, but hey

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