Bypassing firewall for AIM file transfer?

My friends and I use AIM to send stuff back and forth but it is 4x slower when I send than when I receive. I assume this is because of my firewall, and there is a place that says "Port Number to Use." Is there a way to speed it up?

 

It would be their firewall probably. Firewalls stop or hamper incoming traffic, not outbound. A software firewall will check the packets going out, but once you allow it, there shouldn't be a problem. Try turning your firwall off completely and see if it helps. If it does, then it is yours, but I would suspect theirs is the one slowing it down.

 

That, and people have asynchronous connections any more. Are you using DSL, kickin1019? Or cable? What's your friend using?
And for the port number to use, you can just forward that single port through your firewall to your computer for AIM transfers.

 

cable, adsl, FIOS are all asyncronous connections. so yes they are still around. I had sDSL for a year and then the forcably switched me to aDSL for the same rate...really pissed me off.

Like stated a firewall will only restrict incoming (unless otherwise noted when programming a router i.e shutting off port 20/21 for certain IP/subnets). What it does is inspect an incoming packet to see if it was actually requested by an internal IP address. If it was then its accepted and the flow is normal, otherwise the packet is dropped and business as usual. when you send something out the fire wall doesnt care, unless you program it to block cewrtain ports and/or creat an acl with certain restrictions. Other then that the only ways to bypass a firewall is to use dial up, or to turn/shut it off (minus the usual malicous software and techniques used today).

 

Yea I had the same problem with my linksys router. Try doing this...

1. go to your router's ip home page...if you have a linksys its usually 192.168.1.1 and with the password admin

2. then look for something like application & gaming and with a subcategory of port triggering

3. set it up like my picture...AIM's port number should be 5190



hope this works

 

I asuume thats the fix for aim randomly loggin on and off too. Ill try it for fun and see what happens.

edit: it didnt work, Ill go another route to fix this.

 

Well I am not sure for randomly logging on because I never heard of that problem. But if you are talking about randomly get disconnected, I used to have that problem so I just upgraded the firmware for my router and it worked.

 

Oo I have a linksys router, I am going to go try that now.

Alright well as far as I know, there is no admin password on the router, is there anyway i can just get in?

 

Well there should be a default password by linksys which is admin.

 

EDIT: default is admin/admin and I changed it, now all I need is a friend to wake up so i can see if it worked.

 

Well i put in the port numbers on the router's homepage and even told AIM to use the same port but still no love. Any other ideas?

 

Well another thing is that you said that your sending (upload) to your friend is a lot slower than you receive (download). This might be because of your dsl/cable plan.

http://www.bandwidthplace.com/speedtest/

Run this speed test and tell me your download and upload score.

 

5.7 megabits per second

Communications 5.7 megabits per second
Storage 701.4 kilobytes per second
1MB file download 1.5 seconds
Subjective rating Awesome

I dont see anywhere about an upload speed?

 

Haha sorry. I think I gave you the wrong speedtest url. You need to go to dslreports.com

http://www.dslreports.com/stest

 

Your download speed : 4531 kbps or 566.4 KB/sec.
That is 28.8% worse than an average user on comcast.net

Your upload speed : 343 kbps or 42.9 KB/sec.
That is 17.1% worse than an average user on comcast.net


So does that just mean that I'm screwed?