Port Forwarding
From MercuryWiki
Contents |
What ?
Port forwarding is when you allow someone on the internet, through your router / firewall / modem, to connect to a port on your computer. By default, most routers don't allow this and a firewall blocks all unknown incoming connections by default, which prevents your msn contacts from connecting to your Mercury client. If your contact has the same situation, no direct connection can be established between the 2 clients. This results in a slow transfer rate for filetransfer, and a slow refresh rate for webcam (and in case of WLM 8.5 and higher, a disconnection).
Firewall
If your firewall is blocking the incoming webcam connection, you will need to allow tcp port 6891.
Automatically using NAT-PMP
Support for NAT-PMP (Airport Express, Airport Extreme, Time Capsule) is in Mercury since version 2.0.
Automatically using UPNP
If you have a router with UPNP support, Mercury with the upnp library installed should be able to do the port forwarding for you.
Manually
How to forward a port is different for every router. Some suggestions you may wish to try:
- Look in the manual provided along with your router
- Visit portforward.com, it has detailed instructions for a lot of routers. Direct links for the webpage of some routers are listed below:
- Google the brand and type of your router.
The port you need to forward is 6891 by default.
Change the port number (Mercury 2.0+)
Filetransfer : You can change this from the account settings, press F7 in Mercury and type filetransfer.port.
Webcam : You can change this from the global settings, press F8 in Mercury and type webcam.port.
Multiple internal networks
If, like me, you have a apple airport express base station plugged in to your internal network but set up to run in it's own network segment, you may need to forward twice:
- From your router to the apple airport express (do this on your router, from the router ip to the airport express ip)
- And also from the airport express to your computer (also see natpmp)
