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#224149 05/08/10 07:25 PM
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drum Offline OP
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Currently, mIRC uses a default port range of 1024-5000 for establishing DCC connections. Many modern operating systems (including Windows Vista and 7) have stopped using this range for dynamic connections and now use the IANA suggested range of 49152-65535. I think it would be appropriate for mIRC to start using this range by default, especially with the introduction of uPnP support.

Also, "randomize ports" ought to be enabled by default.

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Fjord artisan
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Well, my router doesn't support UPnP (it supports NAT-PMP). I generally change the port range to 1024-1048. And leave Randomize port disabled. This works better in most situations. Randomizing the port is really unnecessary.


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Hoopy frood
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It MIGHT be a good idea. But ALOT of ppl have port forwarding set up for the default mIRC ports. To change the default would only add confusion.


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Hoopy frood
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UPnP might be supported, but the vast majority of setups are still using router port mapping. Using random ports by default would seriously confuse users who already have trouble setting up their routers. I don't think these defaults should be changed. Sites like portforward.com already have a plethora of guides for various routers (using screenshots et al) that tell users how to configure their routers for mIRC. Changing these settings would mean all of these guides would have to be redone, which is taxing on the sites and would cause more confusion in the meantime.


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Hoopy frood
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Enabling Randomize Ports wouldn't (shouldn't) require any changes to those sites or anyone's setups. Even if randomized, it's still within the port range that is there and if that doesn't change, nothing has to be done by the user or those sites.

Changing the port range to something else would be an issue, though. That said, I really don't think the range should be 1024-5000. There's no good reason for that and it opens a lot of ports. It would be better to drop that to 20 ports for most people, or to be conservative, 100. But, yes, that does affect those sites.


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Hoopy frood
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Randomizing the ports *does* cause issues though.

mIRC "reserves" 1024-5000, but it doesn't use that entire range. Some routers cannot forward ranges, but rather only single ports at a time. Users (obviously) don't add all 3976 ports in that case, sometimes they just add 5. And often in this scenario they don't update their port range in mIRC, either because they are unaware that it is needed, or expect mIRC to (correctly) take the first 5 ports and fail on the rest. Whatever the reason, we see users in #mIRC who have this setup. Randomizing ports would break the setup for these users. We've actually seen users with this exact problem of having selected randomize ports and forgetting to update the range to match their router's, so I'm fairly sure it would only happen more often if enabled by default.


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drum Offline OP
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With further consideration, I agree that a change would likely cause more problems than it would solve. Thanks for the feedback.


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