Chat Problems - Ports & Firewalls

[Solarith]

As anyone who is at school, university or work will know, System Administrators sometimes do the strangest things in order to solved certain problems. However, what they have done to my university network really takes the biscuit. In order to prevent the spread of the Sasser virus, they are 'experimenting' with stopping all incoming/outgoing traffic from certain ports.

Unfortunately, at the moment those ports include AO's Chat Server (meaning I can play the game but without any chat at all), IRC (meaning I can't use my guild's IRC->AO relay channel) and AO's website based game chat (which I presume uses the same ports as chat in the game itself). All of this consider, AO is a pretty lonely place at the moment, not being able to communicate with anyone at all.

Therefore I'm bringing my situation to the technologically gifted here on the chat forums for any suggestions

So :-

a) Does anyone actually know what the port (or port range) is for AO Chat, and if it's possible to alter it somehow so I can swap to an unblocked port.

b) Are there any easy work arounds to the situation that anyone has come across. The university uses an HTTP (cache) proxy server but I'm not sure that can be used in this case and I'm not that eager on spending money on another HTTP proxy server as I'm leaving in a few weeks.

c) Has the new chat system caused this to be a bigger issue than before? I used to have port problems but it used to just be lag with the old chat system rather than not even logging on to the chat server when the game loads up.

Thanks in advance for you help!

[Chimihou]

I'll look into this as much as I can, but I'm not an expert.

Though HTTP-Tunnel is probably the TYPE of workaround you'll need in this case.
http://www.http-tunnel.com/html/solu...nel/client.asp

It's now a pay service though....
Have to look around for something similar for free (for college students).

Then again, you only have a few more weeks left!

Can you talk with your network admin about the problem? Blanket blocking loads of ports and ranges is a rather lame way to stop worm issues. :P Maybe they'll open the port for you. :P Start a petition. :P

You might also want to shoot off an email to AO tech support and ask if there are alternate ports available for the chat side of AO. If so, see if there's a preference somewhere.