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jonsid

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 20, 2011
1
0
Hi to anyone reading,

Apologies to anyone who is re-reading from other forums - i am just trying to find an answer, as this is still inconclusive.

Having been a pc user for 2 decades (since i was 5 and my techy dad got me into it) and helped me build my first pc at 10, i have finally made that jump to Mac.

Long story short - i am loving it, as a photographer/digital artist the system is so much nicer to work on, feels cleaner, and is definately faster than my aging core2duo tower was (i7 + 16gb of ram in this lovely 27"iMac!) however, since day 1 there has been something that has been bugging me.

The Problem: I cannot connect to MSN / windows services from my Mac,

the stats are that this is the newest model iMac 27", it is connected to a Netgear DG834GT router, (tested over wired, and airport) and from day 1, msn has not worked. I tried MSN for mac, i tried adium, as well as others. I also tried to connect on all of these apps via http instead as a work around, they still all fail to connect to the service.

It wasnt until recently (my girlfriend was trying to access her hotmail webmail account - something i am not familiar with as all my mailboxes run through my own domain) and i noticed that hotmail.com times out. It is possibly worth mentioning at this stage that my msn/windows live login is @mypersonaldomain.com and not a .hotmail / .live etc - however i did get my sister to try and login with her hotmail.com credentials on all of the clients, through http, and standard ports to disprove the theory that it was to do with my domain - and sure enough, hers did not sign in either.

I have tried to ping, and traceroute "hotmail.com" in terminal - and cannot resolve,

I have also tried to traceroute to "origin.mail.live.com" as this is what i think it resolves to, and i could not connect either.
login.live.com or live.com in general cannot be resolved

I have run router updates, and downgrades.

I have checked that neither little snitch, nor peerguardian are on just in case of a conflict.

I have ensured the internal firewall is disabled.

I have tried this with and without a virus scanner, and the firewall is turned off.

I have tried opening ports on the router, to my fixed local ip (even ran in DMZ mode to test)

I have also rebooted the router, upgraded its firmware. Any of the windows boxes in my house can connect to hotmail.com fine, and connect to msn messenger without a hitch.

I have tried setting my dns server to the routers address, as well as setting the ones recommended by my isp directly, still to no avail.

I have tried several different releases of messenger:mac / Adium/etc - and in addition to this, have tried both Safari and Google Chrome to access the sites directly, but i guess this is irrelevant given that i cannot even ping them in terminal.

I have also tried all of this over the past 2 months, and i think i am at the stage where i can safely argue that this is an issue at my end, and not server side with Microsoft.



the only way of connecting to the service that i have established so far, is that i have linked my hotmail account to a jabber account on a free german jabber server, and then imported this jabber account into iChat. it works,(and is surprisingly stable) but this what i would refer to as a "less than secure workaround", and i dont understand why hotmail.com will not connect - it times out in any web browser i try, and as stated, will not respond to ping or traceroute.

i have checked the mac hostfile just incase something was corrupted there, and it doesnt seem to have anything in it that it shouldnt.

alternatively - does anyone have any other suggestions?

either way - I have stumbled upon a few answers here so far from the community that have helped me with other issues that I had since making the mac crossover - just hoping someone here can make a suggestion on this, as the first goodness knows how many pages of searches on google has brought up nothing.

Jono.

PS. Skype works fine - video is great, sound is good, written chat works, and screenshare is great. - Why do so many people still use msn?
 
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