Comments | tongodeon: Skype

tongodeon

Skype > iChat

Feb 19, 2007 01:23

This evening Sneery wanted to talk to his friends the japanese houseguests for a few minutes. He's got a MacBook Pro, I've got a new MacBook Regular. We couldn't get iChat AV to work, but Skype *did* work. Now at least we've got options when iChat AV doesn't work, which is frequently around here.

Of course it could be the router. I've got a ( Read more... )

skype, ichat, macintosh:trouble

Comments 15

giantlaser February 19 2007, 10:04:48 UTC

Chances are good that you simply need uPNP support at your router. Check to see if it supports it out of the box.

If it doesn't, get a LinkSys WRT54GL and install DD-WRT. Cheap. Superior.

tongodeon February 19 2007, 16:36:59 UTC

I've got a LinkSys WRT54G and its stock firmware *does* support uPNP. I think that's why Skype works as well as it does.

Also, I've had a problem with DD-WRT. Under heavy bittorrent style loads it stops passing DNS requests, or it starts passing them *very* slowly. This has happened to me under several different versions on 2 different routers so I'm pretty sure that it's either a bug or a consistent mistake on my part.

giantlaser February 19 2007, 16:45:13 UTC

I've seen something like that. I've adjust my conntrack settings to 4096 max requests (the max on my software load) and timeout of 128 seconds. That's resolved most issues. I do occasionally have problems with DNS requests not being answered fast enough by DNSMasq, but it seems to be related to making many requests in parallel. For instance, when I open 10 tabs at once to different hosts, some choke and fail to load.

I haven't tested it yet, but I planned to pass an option to DHCPMasq to force it to give out several DNS servers, some of which aren't the local resolver. That reduces the effectiveness of having local DNS service, but not enough to matter.

(The comment has been removed)

Thread 11

mmcirvin February 19 2007, 15:44:30 UTC

My experience is that Skype works just fine on my Mac but has an alarming tendency to bluescreen the Windows PC on the other end. I've never actually tried to use iChat AV, though I guess I know a couple of people I could give it a shot with.

slurketta February 19 2007, 20:17:41 UTC

no tech response whatsoever, but delighted etymological response: I'm guessing "dick in a box" is either accepted nickname for said gadget or your own newly coined nickname for same, either way it's one of those things that is my favorite layer cake: at once really funny and a mind-blowing synecdoche-metaphor-gentle self-mockery plus a celebration of the transience of memes and the conductivity of the interweb. It's a thing geeks do very well, and I like it very much.

tongodeon February 20 2007, 01:09:24 UTC

I was referring to my earlier dick in a box post. The "box" that Steve announced shortly after that post is the router in question.

matrushkaka February 19 2007, 20:47:54 UTC

Hopefully we'll get this iChat issue fixed before I go to Georgia.

usernameguy February 19 2007, 21:10:41 UTC

I wouldn't expect the 802.11n to solve, once and for all, video streaming problems. Video streams require low, consistent latencies, but the 802.11's can't always provide them. Just be aware, YMMV, etc.

tongodeon February 20 2007, 01:13:02 UTC

This has nothing to do with 802.11n; my current 54mbps connection is about 100x faster than my upload (video-sending) speed anyway. This has to do with Apple selling a product that they claim will correctly handle whatever UPNP and tunneling that iChat needs to do its thing. I could have just as easily solved this problem with an earlier AirPort but I knew an update was coming so I waited.