SUMMARY
-------
AIM Express doesn't work on my home computer. I think the packets are
being blocked by either squid or iptables. Does AIM Express work with
squid? If so, how can I configure squid and iptables to allow this
traffic?

DETAILS
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I am trying to use AIM Express on my home computer (WinNT Workstation
4) but I can't get past the logon screen. I don't get any error
messages -- it just goes off into limbo.

I suspect that my squid/iptables configuration is stopping the AIM
Express packets. Here is how my computers are set up. The WinNT box
is connected to my Red Hat 7.1 box on eth0. All Web traffic for WinNT
is via squid -- Red Hat is not set up for NAT. Squid has all of the
standard ports open (e.g., http/https/ftp.) The Red Hat box is
running an iptables firewall which only has the standard ports open
(e.g., squid on the inside, http/https/ftp/dns on the outside.) The
Red Hat box uses a PPPoE DSL connection to get to the Internet.

My understanding was that AIM Express does all of its communications
over port 80. However, when I tried running AIM Express at work, our
firewall logged that it had blocked packets destined for port 5190.
At home I opened up port 5190 on my iptables firewall but AIM Express
still didn't respond. I even tried opening ports 5190 through 5193
for inbound and outbound connections to no avail.

Any help in getting the right configuration is greatly appreciated --
my kids are going through severe IM withdrawal, and I need to fix this
problem to save my sanity! ;-)

Mike