solved.

[zsouthboy]

It works on my LAN and on my own box (internal loopback).. but when I had a friend try it, we couldn't connect.

I am using port 1008(perhaps this isn't the best for across the internet?), and my friend had his firewall completely turned off.

Anything simple that I probably neglected to take care of?

Using a client-server model for the chat...

 

[labgeek]

First thing you want to do is change the port. <1024 are "well known ports". These are considered reserved by most. And it's common to limit traffic on them based on those port numbers. 1024 through 49151 are registered ports. For private uses such as this 49152 to 65535. http://www.iana.org/assignments/port-numbers Just because your friend has turned off the firewall software doesn't mean it's not getting filtered somewhere between the two.

 

[zsouthboy]

going to try that next....

 

[DaveSimmons]

aside from firewalls, if either of you has a router it could have ports turned off (see its instructions for opening ports to work with games).

You could also change the port to 80 if you aren't also running a HTTP server (though your ISP might be blocking it to prevent home servers?)

 

[Descartes]

It's a pain in the arse to try to troubleshoot network-level issues without looking at things on the network-level Here is what I do to troubleshoot issues like these:

- At least verify that the host in question is up. i.e. ping it
- If it's TCP-based, try telneting to it. If you can't telnet to it, fire up tcpdump to see what's happening to the handshake (SYN->SYN/ACK->ACK). I resolve network-related issues almost 90% of the time at this step alone. Usually I see a RST packet being sent by the host in question. This indicates that either the program is not bound to the appropriate port, or that the firewall is stupid and sends a RST packet for traffic it disallows. If you get NO packets back from the host and it IS up, then it's almost 100% certain that a firewall is blocking it. If it's UDP-based, the host will kick back an ICMP port unreachable packet if there's no program bound to the port in question. Ethereal is great for things like this.

You could spend hours fiddling around with different things and you might not even have connectivity. Verify the foundation before you try to fix the cracked walls.

[edit]fixed link[/edit]