Netgear FWG114P Firewall Issues w/ Inbound AIM Port - fixes?

The Setup
I am running four systems through a Netgear FWG114P router as my only firewall (no other software firewalls on the network). One system is hardwired to the router while another one is connected via a PowerLine network while the last two are connected through the 802.11g wifi band. All my systems are running Windows 2000SP4 with AVG AntiVirus (no other firewalls or spyware protection apps). All computers have manually assigned IP's with DHCP disabled across the network. So here is the issue:

The Problem with AIM
Although the FWG114P has a built in service for AIM's 5190 TCP port, when opening the inbound port for it, AIM itself still refuses to function when doing a direct connect or file transfer. Whenever I tried to get it to work, the router would simply drop my computer's connection to it preventing me from accessing the internet or even the router itself. However, upon opening a custom port separate from 5190, it began working just fine. But recently, I noticed that when trying to sending larger files, I would be blocked from my network (all internet activity stops, connections to the router is refused) as the file transfer reached 8MB or more.

Ideas?
I have been quite perplexed by this situation. I cannot figure out if this is a problem with my router, AIM itself, or perhaps a hardware issue. I replaced my ethernet cable with a new one but both have the same effect. I'm pretty sure the onboard ethernet could not have died yet as I have been able to do things over port http without too much trouble.

Random Disconnections
Another strange and perhaps related issue is as follows: When trying to access secure sites such as hotmail or yahoo mail, i found that I would often get the same issue where my internet access is disabled and access to the router is refused (although I am still able to ping the router just fine). The other people on my network have a very narrow use of the internet so generally have not run into anything I have run into mostly because they don't use AIM or hotmail or yahoo mail. However, this problem is on and off and not consistent.

So in the end, I do not know what is possibly wrong. Any suggestions?

 

Try forwarding port 5190 for both TCP and UDP, and see if that helps.

Cheers,

Alphalutra1

 

I will give that a shot and see what happens as soon as I can find someone to send a file to. I myself am not familiar with the technical aspects of TCP vs. UDP, but if AIM is built around TCP by itself, how would allowing it to use UDP correct the issue? In addition to that, if it does work, would the default port number matter? My issue is that my router only allows port forwarding and not triggering so I have to map out separate inbound ports for the other computers on the LAN. So would it matter what port number I use?

 

So I opened up both TCP and UDP but I still get the same effect... it's really strange. I have the same router at both work and at home but think something more is going on since both routers experience the same behavior. Is anyone familiar with the Windows registry? I wrote up a script to modify TCP/IP behavior based on an internet speed guide I found with the following modifications:

Code:

"DisableTaskOffload"=dword:00000000
"GlobalMaxTcpWindowSize"=dword:00256960
"TcpWindowSize"=dword:00256960
"DefaultTTL"=dword:00000064
"EnablePMTUDiscovery"=dword:00000000
"EnablePMTUBHDetect"=dword:00000000
"SackOpts"=dword:00000001
"TcpMaxDupAcks"=dword:00000002

Could the change of the TCP window sizes and all those other factors play a role in messing around with my connectivity? For more information on these tweaks, please see: http://www.speedguide.net/read_articles.php?id=157

 

well, figured out at least part of my own question. Apparently the numbers I put in for the TCP window size and such were inputted assuming decimal but recorded into the registry as hex, completely messing up the latencies for the entire network, which made connectivity difficult if not impossible. As much as everything seems to be working better, I'm still getting some fidgity performance issues with Yahoo and Hotmail.

that in mind, has anyone ever manipulated the MTU setting in their router and/or in Windows? Has that ever made any difference in internet performance and accessibility? (I currently use the PPPoE default of 1492 as 1500 did not like me too much)