For the last couple of weeks or so (maybe it’s just been a week, I don’t know), I haven’t been able to connect to MSN with Kopete or Gaim. It has worked fine since initial installation of Ubuntu, and all of a sudden it just stopped and kept spitting out an “operation is not supported” error message. I didn’t really look into it during that time. But yesterday, it finally pissed me off enough to sit down and troubleshoot it.
After a bit of thinking, Googling, and reading forum posts, I remembered that MoBlock (PeerGuardian for Linux) had recently been updated.
Why would that cause any problems? Well, I remembered that when I initially installed it, I had to remove the Microsoft ranges that MoBlock blocked so that I can connect to MSN. I followed some steps in the Ubuntu Forum MoBlock thread to remove these ranges and it worked… until the update.
Thinking that the update re-added the Microsoft ranges, I figured I’d follow the same steps. When I looked at my MoBlock settings, sure enough, Microsoft was getting blocked again. Then I thought, no. I just want MSN to work and not block all of Microsoft.
So I followed some other steps in the MoBlock thread to tell it to allow the port number Gaim and Kopete use to connect to the MSN servers:
- sudo gedit /etc/moblock/MoBlock-nfq.sh
- Found the line: WHITE_TCP_OUT=”http https”
- Added 1863 (MSN Port #) to that line, like this: WHITE_TCP_OUT=”http https 1863″
- Saved the file and closed it.
- Did a sudo /etc/init.d/moblock-nfq restart
That’s it! No more problems! Then, I got this satisfying feeling in my tummy!
Works perfect for me on Ubuntu (/etc/moblock/moblock.conf)
I also had to add port 443 and then restart blockcontrol (/etc/init.d/blockcontrol restart)
Thanks
Really helpful, thanks.
This page is helpful for other ports/features: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927847