On Thu, 12 Oct 2006, Brian Henning wrote:
Hm. Forgive me if I'm telling you things you already know, but your replies
make it sound like you're confusing services.
IRC =/=/= "Instant Messaging"
OK I'm confused.
(that is, "not congruent".. IRC is relatively instant, but.. well, anyway:
)
IRC is one form of real-time text communication. One could call it a form of
"instant messaging" and not be entirely wrong. However, Yahoo, MSN, AIM, and
others are not IRC. They have their own protocols, ports, etc.
OK IRC is a protocol. It's one of family of protocols used
for real-time text communiction (is that the correct
lingo?). (Wikipedia calls it Online chatting.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_chat
None of the IM services I've ever used require any particular inbound
firewalling, as long as your firewall is set to allow RELATED,ESTABLISHED.
RELATED is for multiport protocols (like ftp) and you need a
module for each protocol?
My firewall (gShield), whose configuration is a bit beyond
me, has an option for conntracking IRC. This isn't what I
want is it? - this is for conntracking, not filtering
(right?). I do have ip_conntrack_irc.o and ip_nat_irc.o in
/lib/modules/....
Looking up my kernel (2.4.28) config, I only see an option
to build iptables, but no finer options (like irc helper
modules). Do I need user space modules for iptables?
Only in the case of things like direct-connect might specific inbound rules
be necessary.
which I take it aren't involved here?
For all the "commercial" protocols (AIM, Yahoo, MSN...), gaim knows how to
get connected, as it simply has to resolve one or two hostnames that point at
servers run by the companies (and that's why there isn't a server option for
those services). IRC, on the other hand, is not centralized, and to connect,
one must know the hostname of an IRC service. Some common ones are freenode,
EFnet, and DALnet.
If your kid is trying to get onto one of the commercial IM services, setting
up a test case using a local IRC server isn't likely to tell you anything
useful.
sure. but while I can't connect to myself (client and server
on one linux box), there's not much hope of me figuring out
his problem. I was hoping to show him connecting to my
server first with a client for an open protocol.
Hope all that was somewhat helpful :-)
I'm much less confused now :-)
Thanks Joe
--
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
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Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux!
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