cannot connect to yahoo with pidgin 2.7.0

[John Bailey]

On 05/31/2010 04:50 AM, Hemal Pandya wrote:
> Today I installed Pidgin 2.7.0 on a new Windows XP machine and found
> that it cannot connect to my yahoo account.
> 
> Here's what I have found so far:
> 
> 1. The debug window reports that it is trying to connect to
> vcs1.msg.yahoo.com which cannot be resolved to an ip address.

I'd recommend troubleshooting DNS.  If you can't resolve vcs1.msg.yahoo.com,
you're almost certainly going to have other DNS issues that will hinder things
like buddy icons and possibly even the authentication mechanism.

> 2. I could not find a place where the host to connect to can be
> specified. I am pretty sure this was possible in earlier versions but
> I haven't used pidgin for about 3 months

I removed this field in 2.7.0 because it is no longer necessary with the changes
I made that involve using vcs1.msg.yahoo.com.

> 3. I changed the ..../etc/hosts file and gave an address for
> vcs1.msg.yahoo.com that is same as scs.msg.yahoo.com

Bad idea.  They are completely different server clusters that have completely
different purposes.

> 4. Now I found that pidgin is trying to connect to port 80 on that
> server. Should it not be connecting to 5050? Port 80 is not reachable
> on that server, 5050 is. Setting pager port has no affect.

The reason port 80 is being attempted is that vcs1.msg.yahoo.com is a web server
cluster, not a YMSG server cluster.  The connection process is to request a URL
from vcs1, then parse the response to find a connect server.  (This is Yahoo's
form of load-balancing across their many YMSG servers.)  Once the connect server
is parsed from the HTTP response, we begin the login process, which involves the
traditional YMSG packet to port 5050, followed by some HTTPS login magic, then a
return to traditional YMSG.

Note that this process is as close to how the official Yahoo client works as we
can make it, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a difference between the official
client and Pidgin when looking at a packet capture.

> Appreciate if someone can point me at a workaround. Thanks in advance

The only workaround I can think of at this point, but I wouldn't recommend,
would be to find an IP address for vcs1.msg.yahoo.com and hard code it as you've
already done.  That is, however, a really bad idea.  You should be finding out
why your DNS server isn't working correctly and correcting that instead.

John

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