Yahoo Messenger and Telnet

Hello,

I hope this is the correct forum to ask this question..

I was wondering if someone could explain something to me. While online I normally monitor my TCP and UDP connections on TCPView. Today I noticed something diiferent about how my Yahoo messenger connects to the net. Anyhow, this is what I saw..

YahooMessenger.exe:3044 TCP mycomputer:1046 sip24.voice.re2.yahoo.com:https ESTABLISHED
YahooMessenger.exe:3044 TCP mycomputer:1041 cs105.msg.sp1.yahoo.com:telnet ESTABLISHED

Now as I recall, these two connections ~used~ to be https and http connections. Where as now the second one is a TELNET connection rather than an HTTP connection. I'm not sure if it's really anything to worry about since it's connected to a Yahoo address.. I just found it kind of strange.

Can anyone shed some light on this?

 

I'm a bit of a Yahoo Messenger/Chat junkie, so I think I can answer this one .

All that's happening is that Yahoo Messenger is connecting to a different port on Yahoo's messenger servers. What's actually being transferred is still exactly the same.

The messenger servers actually listen for connections on many ports, including 80, 443, etc, with the "main" one being 5050. Normally messenger will attempt to connect to port 5050, but if that fails messenger will try several other ports. If the connection succeeds on one of the other ports, it will save it in the registry and connect to that port in the future.

If you open regedit, navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\yahoo\pager, and then delete the "Port" value, messenger should revert back to using port 5050 for its main connection.

 

Hi Luta,

Thank you SO much for your reply! I wasn't ~too~ worried about this since the telnet port was connecting to a Yahoo site. It's just that I always remember seeing an http connection and now all of a sudden it's a telnet connection. And any time I see subtle changes like that.. I tend to get a little paranoid

Again, thank you for your answer & have a great day!

--steve

 

Hello,

Actually, your telnet port was closed. You connected to telnet port on the server. It is possible that due to load, routing or whatever, they also enabled the telnet port for IM communications.

Furthermore, using specific ports does not necessarily have to be for services that usually use it. For example, you could open your web server on port 566 rather than the conventional 80.

Mrk

 

In XP Home, and XP Pro SP2 Telnet is disabled in Services by default, so I cant see how it connecting with Yahoo is possible

 

Hello,

Telneting from Windows with telnet disabled no. But he can connect to the telnet port on a remote server without problems. Depends on what the server is running on that port. It could be running web server there.

For example, if you set the Listen directive in the Apache web server configuration file to port 23, then you have a web server running on a telnet port.

Or if you want to use p2p at work, then you can set your server to run on ports 25 or 110, fooling the corporate firewall to think you're doing normal smtp or pop3 sessions.

Mrk