fred avolio's musings

I spoke to my friend, networking expert Dave Piscitello, who said

It sounds like the Westell does port-based NAT (PNAT). You are actually performing PNAT twice. Since when you only have the ADSL router, you can video chat anywhere, I suspect you can’t PNAT the connections twice. (This is the case with IPsec.)

Today, I did the following, per his suggestion:

• Put the Westell aDSL modem/router into bridge mode
• Let the Netgear Router make the authentication to my ISP

(Dave had pointed me to How do I set up a Netgear router with a Westell?)

With and without UPnP selected in the router, the result was almost the same as it has been. The connection with test-user rjinwipc just sat there saying, “Waiting for a response from rjinwipc.” A connection attempt to ichatavtesting resuled in “”Failed to start video chat because: Frederick M. Avolio did not respond.” I could get to appleu3test0, no problem.

I think I am ready to give up.

Although I do thank Dave, Ralph John, and Frèdèric in France.

These are some recent comments from an Apple discussion thread on the subject of iChat video with AIM. Let me just point out, they summarize my experiences. “but my basic conclusion based on what I have seen is that there are issues with video chat between AIM 5.9 and iChat AV, and there isn’t much i can do about it for now” “I can no longer in good conscience recommend iChat AV to AIM 5.9 for cross platform video conferencing as there are just too many issues”

If any of you try to connect to test—and that would be fine if I am around, please do e-mail if it failed. Or send an IM text note. I don’t want anyone to think I hung up on him!. (30 minutes ago someone connected for a video-chat. I accepted, we connected, I saw his smiling face, and BAM! Gone. I didn’t get his name and am not sure what when wrong.) (Does iChat log these video attempts?)