[Simon]

I've got iChat AV running at home and it works very well.

Problem is, at the lab where I work we have a firewall that basically blocks all outgoing traffic to everything other than port 22 (ssh) and 80 (http). Skype doesn't seem to have a problem with that, but iChat AV does.

At first I thought, fine I'll open up an ssh tunnel to another PC I have access to on another part of the university network. It turns out that there port 5190 (which iChat needs for communication with the AIM server) is blocked.

I then tried to add a
LocalForward 5190 login.oscar.aol.com:5190
for my one of my home Macs in my work Mac's ssh config file, but that doesn't seem to work either. No idea why not though.

Does anybody have an idea how I can get iChat AV to work from behind this stupid firewall?

[ghporter]

I've seen reference to port 5298 and 5299. But while looking, I found this bit of information. With the OS X firewall off (at home, of course) run some iChat sessions and then run netstat in Terminal. The log should show you which ports iChat wants.

Now for fixing what your problem at work is. Have you looked into this:
iChat > Preferences > Accounts > Server Options > Port
That's pretty well hidden from my point of view! (No, I didn't come up with that by myself-I found it here.

[Simon]

Glenn, thanks for your help.

I know about the preference settings. That's where I got login.oscar.aol.com:5190 from. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to work with ssh local forwards. I have no idea why though. I also don't understand why iChat is throwing a fit while Skype has no problems at all with my firewall, NAT or routers.

[ghporter]

That's just goofy. I'm lost now... Anyone?

[IceEnclosure]

http://www.ralphjohnsuk.dsl.pipex.com/index.html

http://www.mvldesign.com/video_conference_tutorial.html

hope they help

[Simon]

I'll definitely take a look. Thanks for the links.