mac-to-pc chats

[Daniel Atallah]

On Fri, Jun 14, 2013 at 5:31 PM, Kevin Justie <kjustie at webrary.org> wrote:
>
> On an all-Mac, iChat-using network, I've now added a PC with Pidgin.
> Chatting between Mac and PC works perfectly -- as long as the PC initiates
> the chat.  If I try to initiate the chat from a Mac -- meaning the PC does
> not already have a chat conversation window open for the Mac -- the chat
> sent by the Mac never appears on the PC and on the Mac I get "The instant
> messaging connection failed."  Yet I can immediately chat from PC to Mac,
> and that works, and then I can chat back from Mac to PC.
>
> Something I've missed in setup or configuration that's preventing initial
> chats from showing up on the PC?


It's hard to say without more information, but it's quite likely that
a firewall on the Windows machine is blocking the incoming connection
necessary to initiate the conversation.

This is an incoming TCP connection, by default on port 5298, but you
can override the port in the Advanced settings of your Bonjour account
in Pidgin (note that if you change the port, some clients will be
unable to connect, so it's best to leave it as 5298).

You'll want to make sure that your firewall isn't blocking that port,
and that the remote machines can connect to your machine on that port.

If you still have issues, you'll need to get a Debug Log (Help->Debug Window).

-D

-D