UPDATED ON APRIL 7, 2011 Magic Jack, this amazing usb device will allow you to make unlimited calls to the US and Canda for $20.00 per year and better yet, you get a registered landline number that allows you to receive calls. I’ve found a lot of sites on how to set up routers, firewalls and access points to allow Magic Jack to pass through. None of them worked. It was agitating so I had to do some tests on my own. Read on for the complete port lists.
Magic Jack is very easy to install in the first place. Just plug it in and then plug your phone to it. The executable or installer should run automatically, if not open the flash drive, find it and then run it. The next part will deal with firewalls and port settings.
I used Active Ports to find out what ports MagicJack was using and it turns out that it uses a lot of UDP ports and two TCP ports. Their website specifically states that the device only uses UDP ports 5060-5070 (reference: LINK (removed) – GOOGLE’S WEB CACHE OF THE PAGE UPDATE April 7, 2011:The knowledge base has been down for a while but I managed to retrieve Google’s cache of the site.) which I found out was clearly not true. I found this out by performing calls to a random list of phone numbers (except 911 numbers ^_^). I dialed at least 40 phone numbers repeatedly. After this, I was able to conclude that MagicJack uses random UDP ports in the high range. UDP ports might seem a bit less important than TCP ports but as a Systems Administrator this will create a highly unsecured and exposed network. I was only able to achieve 100% connectivity with the 40 phone numbers after opening a range of UDP ports.
I also stumbled upon a lot of sites and forum posts that tell magic jack users to setup port forwarding, this is NOT true!
Below is the exact list of the TCP and UDP Ports that I had to open in my firewall and router (NOT port forward) to achieve 100% connectivity:
TCP Ports List: 80 (HTTP), 443 (HTTPS)
UDP Ports List: 5060, 5070, 10000-65535
It is really strange why the device was designed like this. My guess is that the device is intended solely for home use and not commercial use.
Looks complicated doesn’t it? Nowadays home theater systems are getting cheaper and more affordable and I still can’t find a decent guide about installing, setting up and basics of these home theaters. Then I realized there are not a lot of good guides because there are hundreds of home theater variations and so I created this guide. This is a very basic guide for home theaters. It won’t deal with how DTS works or how HDMI works. I won’t bother with very technical details because technology changes but the basic fundamentals do not. This guide just tells you how to connect the devices, the two types of experience you get from a home theater and to understand what __ IN / __ OUT jacks are so that you can use the system without paying for the expensive installation cost.
A. Before setting up, try to read a little about these topics:
A. Understanding the common setup for Home Theater Systems
Before starting the setup you need to understand that in a home theater there are only two things you can experience, the audio experience and the video experience each of which gets data from a source, and so by putting this in mind it will be easier for you to understand how to create basic setups and troubleshoot problems.
Video Experience Devices:
– Television / HD Televisions
– Projectors
– Computer Monitors
Possible Sources:
– DVD Players / Blu-ray Players / VCD Players
– Xbox 360
– PSP / PS3 / PS2
– Digital Camcorders
– Digital Cameras
– Personal Computers
– Cable TV
How do these devices work together/communicate?
After knowing these, the next thing to understand would be to learn how these devices communicate with each other. These devices communicate using IN/OUT jacks. No matter how complex the jack may look like (RCA,TOSLINK,DVI,HDMI) or how many there are (RED,WHITE) they only can only do one action. IN jacks receive data/video/audio signals from other devices while OUT jacks send data/video/audio signals to another device. Like the principle of north and south poles of a magnet they need to bind together.
Now that you have read about the basics on the next page I will be showing some examples and jack scenarios on basic Audio and Video Experience connections for home theaters. Don’t like HTPC? I will also include a scenario wherein your PC will be used as a source. ^_^
Skype, Yahoo Messenger, GoogleTalk and Live Messenger, all these have a lot of useless stuff you will not need when the only thing you want to do is have a voice conference with 5-10 or more people. Teamspeak is a dehydrated version of all these messengers leaving only voice conferencing which is solely what you need when multi-tasking. This is most useful when in online games. So to all •Barons• members or anyone who is a member of guild that does sieges out there, this is how to do it. c(”,)
Teamspeak Installation:
1.) Download the file named TeamSpeak 2 Clienthere. The file is about 5mb in size.
2.) Install the program, it is very easy, just click next until the program is installed.
3.) Done!
Teamspeak Test:
1.) Make sure your headset and microphone are properly connected to the rear of you computer, the green jack(speakers/headphones) should be plugged in the green socket and the pink jack(microphone) should be plugged in the pink socket.
2.) Open Teamspeak and click "Settings" and then click "Sound Input/Output Settings". You should see this window below:
There are two settings here:
a.) The first one is just a Volume slider that increases or decreases the speaker volume, I did not highlight this in the image.
b.) The second one, Voice Send Method has two options, "Push to Talk" and "Voice Activation". Push to talk means that to be able to send your voice message you need to press a key in the keyboard, this key can be assigned using the Set button and reset by the Clear button. Voice Activation on the other hand does not need a keypress but rather the sound and volume of your voice, there is a slider below this that sets how easily the system will detect the volume of your voice. Whisper detects the faintest of sounds, this is not recommended when you are using a speaker because it will cause a lot of feedback. Move the slider to the right until you get the mix just right. Don’t put it in Shout though because you will really need to yell just for the system to detect your voice.
3.) The last thing to do would be to will be to test the setup, in the Local Test section, click "Activate local test mode". This will allow you to test your microphone. Try speaking into the microphone, if the setup was a success you should hear your voice from the speakers. The Test Codec option specifies the sound quality, the higher the Kbit the better the sound will be.
Troubleshooting:
I have not encountered a lot of problems with installing or using Teamspeak so far but these by far are the most common:
1.) Cannot use the microphone will using the front panel jacks of the computer. The best solution I have for this would be to disable the front panel detection. This commonly applies to Realtek sound boards. To do this:
a.) Open the control panel for the Realtek sound card and look for the Audio IO window. Click the Connector Settings button:
b.) In the Connector Settings window make sure "Disable front panel jack detection" is checked.
We recently got a Linksys RV042 Dual Wan Router from MicroOptech Davao City, if you’re looking for a good computer shop that finds items for you outside Davao, this is the one. It only took them “TWO” (2) days to get it for us together with a 3com 24-ports 10/100 Mbps LAN Switch! I also purchased some of my computer’s parts here but I will post about it later. I also included a 5-step guide to installing and the configuration of this router, it can be found in the last part of the post.
Anyway about this router: It certainly is a must have for those small businesses who should not have any downtime especially SEO companies that rely on the internet to survive. Very easy to install and manage plus you can have two of these to join two separate networks that are in different locations through it’s VPN system. I enjoyed speeds reaching upto 650KBps per second using this router, this speed was achieved trough load-balancing wherein our two ISPs (one is 3.0Mbps the other is 2.7Mbps) joined forces to quickly get me a copy of Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2008. Not only is this router good but its manufacturer is a partner of Cisco Networking Systems.
These reasons are my opinions on why you should go into Dual-WAN setup rather than a single line:
1.) Two 5 mBps lines will always be better than one 10 mBps line, The reason why is that most ISPs limit the number of connections you can have to certain access point/file so for example you have a download utilizing 5 connections, with Dual-WAN you can have double this number and thus you can reach higher speeds.
2.) You’ll always have a backup line if one goes down.
These reasons are my opinions on why you should NOT go into Dual-WAN setup rather than a single line:
1.) Some websites will detect IP change so if you have a Dual-WAN connection the website will see you as being in two places per session, This is concurrent of DOS attack and you might get logged out of the site due to this.** As a remedy to the above situation I recommend a line that has higher bandwidth than the other, this way the RV042 will use that line always and when the load is not balanced it will automatically go to the other connection thus solving the interchanging IP problem
My Linksys RV042 Dual-Wan Router/ PLDT DSL Modem/Globe DSL Modem and Linksys SipuraSPA VOIP Office Short Layout Video
* This setup places the router in two wan connections, 1 VOIP Modem and is connected to our main switch which is located inside the cabinet. I recommend installing a little fan if the area is a bit hot, A hot router, regardless of brand, will not produce good speeds.
These are five easy steps to do when deploying this router in dual wan mode:
1.) Connect one at a time the two DSL Routers to your PC and configure them to become stand-alone bridges if their connection type is PPPoE. This is the only hard part that you will have to do in this setup. If you’re given a static IP by your ISP it would be much easier then.
2.) Connect the RV042 to your computer temporarily and access http://192.168.0.1 through a browser, if this does not work try accessing http://192.168.1.1/. This should display the router’s configuration page.
3.) Go to Cisco’s website here. Download the appropriate firmware, To do the upgrade go to System Management -> Firmware Upgrade. The reason why this is a must have is because there are a lot of fixes that have happened since the router was initially launched, I will not go into the details but I will require that you do this update before proceeding! A lot of people have not done this and have problems configuring the router usually in VPN.
4.) After the firmware update, connect your two DSL Modems to the WAN 1, DMZ / WAN 2 Lan ports, configure the two WAN connections in the Setup -> Network page of the RV042. It should be located below and should not be that hard to setup because your ISP should provide the details for it, I recommend leaving the “Service Name” fields empty in PPPoE, this caused me five days of figuring out why the router cannot dial one of the lines. This was caused by a Siemens SpeedStream Modem, this modem is good but it’ll kill you if you don’t know how to set it up as a bridge. Also check the setting for Load Balance under System Management->Dual-WAN, should you wish to use only one line/connection and keep the other as a backup when it goes off-line or down, select the Smart Link Backup setting. If you want to do a setup like mine where the two lines will be used simultaneously, select the Load Balance setting.
5.) Test the two connections System Summary Page of the RV042, The connections should light up in the image as light green and if you have connected successfully, Go to the System Management -> Dual-WAN and select Load Balancing to fully utilize both WAN ports of the RV042, and we are done, enjoy the immense speeds of this setup!
If you have any trouble at all setting up this router please add a comment and tell me about it! c(”,)
Update 06/26/08: Tip on DSL Modems and the Linksys RV042 Router
1.) Always check the System Log of your Linksys RV042 router! : I’ve never really noticed this until I realized one day that my Skype IM was always reconnecting, I then studied the router logs and noticed that one of the modems were experiencing intermittent connections. It kept disconnecting every 5-10 minutes! It took so much time troubleshooting, the ISP even had to replace the telephone wire that leads to the modem, and the problem was narrowed down to the DSL Modem and it got replaced. Lesson learned!, always check the System Log of the RV042 when it is in load balancing mode. The reason we won’t notice the intermittent connection is because there are two connections and the RV042 is great at load balancing when one goes down. What it does is that it automatically tries to reconnect that connection and if successful proceeds to balance the load again. Due to this you will not be able to see clear signs that there is something wrong.
This website or its third-party tools process personal data.In case of sale of your personal information, you may opt out by using the link Do not sell my personal information.
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
