Are iChat services down?

Question

Are iChat services down?

O.k. Begining this morning (I got up at appx 0938MDT), iChat (Version 6.0.1 (935)) running on my desktop Mac (Mac Pro early 2009 w/OS 10.7.2) seems to be having serious connectivity issues.

I am connected to the internet. Intranet (wireless and ethernet) working fine, all devices connecting. No problems with email, web surfing, sftp...

I cannot establish or maintain connections to the following types of accounts in iChat: AIM or MobileMe chat (through server 'api.oscar.aol.com'), Jabber accounts (servers chatmask.com, jabber.com). Notably, Jabber services with server jabber.org is working.

No problems with Bonjour or Facebook (server chat.facebook.com)

I've tried cycling iChat. killing imagent process. Removing com.apple.iChat.plist, all the com.apple.iChat.* preference files (including all the lockfiles and preferences for specific chat services). I tried removing the passwords and manually entering them when prompted.

I don't think it's an iChat problem, seems to be some sort of gateway messaging service issue. Only certain chat services are affected.

Status changes to 'Disconnected' and double clicking the error icon reveals the following error messages (for AIM/MobileMe and Jabber accounts)...

iChat can’t communicate with the Mac.com account “xxxxxxx@mac.com”. An undefined AIM session error has occurred.

iChat can’t communicate with the Jabber account “xxxxxxx@chatmask.com”. iChat can’t communicate with the Jabber account “xxxxxxxx@chatmask.com”.

There are no noted outages on the MobileMe webpage.

Is anyone else experiencing this chat problem? I'll update after additional troubleshooting procedures and some checking with other Macs on my network.

- Robert

Mac Pro (Early 2009) - Dual 2.26GHz Quad-Core, Mac OS X (10.6.5), http://www.robsworld.org/mycomputer.html

Posted on Oct 31, 2011 9:36 AM

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Answer 1

Oct 31, 2011 10:12 AM in response to Robert Vaessen

O.k. I'm back. After a restart, I noticed that most of my iChat services were in a 'offline' status, despite the fact that iChat said online. Switched iChat to available, all services checked, all but two changed from 'Connecting' to 'Disconnected' with same errors noted.

After checking individual accounts, it seemed odd that some services connected, while others did not.

I checked my firewall (Hands Off!)... Why hadn't I thought of that earlier?

Somehow three of my servers were marked as 'Deny' outgoing connections using https (port 443). That's the port that many chat services use. I switched the rules to read 'Allow' outgoing connections. I went back to iChat, selected 'Available' and now all is well. All my iChat services are working again (still can't get two of the Jabber clients to work, but I've always had problems there, and it seems as if only one will work at a time...)

So, problem solved. The issue was my firewall had somehow disabled outgoing connections for some port 443 services. I don't know how it happened, but it's working now.

Thanks to me for the solution! :-)

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