If you are looking to get set up Echolink on your shiny new Ubuntu 14.04 machine, be sure to read the how to article I wrote before.
However, even after having such a formidable victory and feeling waves of joy when the repeater list finally populated Qtel on my Trusty Tahr, I had a less-than-raring experience of not being able to hear the ECHOTEST server, or any other repeater, sound.
I remember VA7OBI told me that he had success when he opened 5200 TCP but when I tried everything it didn’t work for me. In fact, remind me to publish the way that this frustration led me to fighting my ISP and how I got two months free internet out of the deal…but I digress… After I did a DMZ on my computer it instantly started working so it was definitely a port problem.
Here is what solved my problem *instantly*.
1. Open router or modem/router configuration page
2. Go to your firewall settings.
3. Open (or often called ‘port forwarding’) the following port range:
5198-5199 UDP
4. Make sure this new rule in your router/modem is pointing to the machine (or multiple machines) where Qtel is installed. In my case it was 192.168.1.75 to show an example IP address.
If you don’t know how to find your IP address, it’s very easy in Ubuntu. Just open your terminal (control + alt + t) and type this:
ifconfig
you will see this kind of spew:
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:16:76:b4:24:17
inet addr:192.168.1.75 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::216:76ff:feb4:2417/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:11386 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:10070 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:9551513 (9.5 MB) TX bytes:1181280 (1.1 MB)
eth0 is your hardwired connection which mine, obviously is. If your machine is connected by wifi, it will look roughly the same but you will see ‘wlan0’ or something like that which will have your ipaddress beside it like mine above.
Now just make sure those 5198-5199 UDP ports are open and pointing to that machine where qtel is.
Final note: your modem/router may, from time to time, send out new IP addresses to your computer(s). If Qtel stops working one day again, it’s probably just a matter of running this tutorial again and updating your IP address in the port forwarding rule in your router/modem.
If you feel really saucy and snazzy, you could set a static IP address for your machine and never run this tutorial again. I’m too lazy for now so I’ll risk having to do this again, ha.
Take it easy and keep on being Ubuntu
So, it was the ports! Thanks for sorting this out.
I spoke to Felix by the way, and he said that he switched from Ubuntu to Debian 🙁 He has submitted packages to the Debian repositories, but they haven’t taken yet. Debian packages tend to end up in Ubuntu anyhow.
So, stuck with a little RARING RINGTAIL~ for now.
Felix has erred greatly in his decision to switch from Ubuntu to Debian. However, I remain grateful of his contributions to our packages and hammabilities. 🙂 This will keep my blog post relevant for longer than necessary. Thanks for the comments. Did this port thing help fix yours too?