Monday, March 19, 2012

Random Skype Disconnections

Recently I'd started having problems with Skype disconnecting several minutes into a call and losing internet access in other applications as well. This initially was only happening with Skype on the iPad so I put it down to bugginess on the iOS version of Skype crashing the router or something on the iPad, however I just had the same disconnection symptoms after about 5 minutes of a video call on my Mac. This time I went to the router's administration page and found that the router (Speedtouch ST780) hadn't recently rebooted but in the event log it said:

Mar 19 22:04:10IDS dos parser : udp flood (1 of 1) : 192.168.1.69 80.229.225.26 1018 UDP 65177->45237

Now this tied in exactly with the time of the call dropping so it looks like Skype is triggering the udp flood detection on the router. There isn't a simple way to disable this through the web interface. So you have to telnet to the router and issue the commands:


ids config state=disabled
saveall


which disables the intrusion detection system. I'm not too worried about this as the router doesn't have any real services listening on it's WAN IP and I trust all the internal clients. Anyway, hopefully problem solved for now.
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2 comments:

Matthew Buckett said...

It turns out this didn't solve my Skype problem and I ended up getting a new router. However a new router didn't fix the problem either, so I'm left believing it's either a bug in Skype or a problem with the iPad.

10:05 am
Anonymous said...

hi, i think you are onto something with the UDP connections from skype crashing the router. seems that some routers don't cope so well with the amount of skype's UDP traffic

in your router config, try blocking all UDP connections FROM all internal IPs TO the internet. skype can still cope with TCP only.

so far this has been working well for me (although only tried a few days ago). i also no longer get the 'flood' warnings in the router log.

i'd be interested to hear how it goes...

11:30 am

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