Connection issues with Pidgin

[Ethan Blanton]

Calk, Nicole spake unto us the following wisdom:
> I am using Pidgin for our Click to Chat feature on my company's website. I
> am getting this error message:
> 
> [image: Inline image 1]
> 
> I opened the debug window and here is what it is showing:
> 
> (11:07:24) connection: Connection error on 05147438 (reason: 0 description:
> Server closed the connection)
> (11:07:24) account: Disconnecting account ncalk at olark.com/pidgin (002D51A8)

This almost certainly means one of a small number of (possibly tightly
related) things:

1) There was an error at the server or on the server's network.
2) There was an error in the Internet.
3) There was an error in your network/NAT/firewall.
4) There is a problem with your local machine's firewall.

If Olark is saying it's not their problem (which may or may not be
true, but we'll assume it is), then we're left with 2-4.  2 is pretty
unlikely if the problem is persistent; if it happened once or twice or
for a short period of time, maybe.  3 is the most likely, and 4 is not
far behind.

> Can you please help me resolve this? We have checked our firewalls and it
> is allowing the connection to go through on our end, and our chat company
> Olark is not seeing an issue on their end.

I would look at the firewall/router/NAT devices on your network more
closely.  It may not be that it is disallowing the connection; it
could also be (for example) that there is a large amount of traffic
passing through it and the connection cache is full, forcing out older
connections that are still active.  (This might happen, for example,
if some user has fired up a Bittorrent client or server, or if there
is a denial of service attack going on, or if your router just sucks.)
It could also be a simple misconfiguration that is showing up now
because something has changed.

Check also your local machine's firewall and network configurations,
but I suspect that since you're connecting at *all*, you'll find the
issue somewhere in your local networking equipment.

Ethan