Connecting older clients that don't support specifying a server.

[ewleonardspock]

I wanted to play with this on some older Macs that don't seem to support version 5 of the client. Version 4 works, but I wasn't able to find a way to change the server that it uses, like you can in version 5.

In my case, I run my own DNS server at home, and I found that configuring login.oscar.aol.com and oscar.aol.com to point to the retro-aim-server IP address has every client I've tried (AIM v4/v5 and iChat) connect to the retro-aim-server successfully without any additional configuration.

So if anyone else wants to try this with old Macs (or old/non-AIM clients in general), adding those domains to your home DNS (or hosts file on your computer) seems to work perfectly.

One other note. On the Macs, for some reason when they re-connect after being rebooted, the client seems to try to connect with port 5191 for some reason. So if you just rebooted your classic Mac and it's not connecting anymore, verify that it's still trying to use port 5190.

[ukozi]

the client seems to try to connect with port 5191 for some reason.

On mine it picks a port at random. I've seen 5191, 80, all sorts of wild stuff. I think this was intentional - if connection on port 5192 fails, try different ports until it works.

Yes, piHole and the like have been the fix to this.

[mk6i]

You can patch the macos 4 client following these instructions Chivanet. LMK if that helps.

[mk6i]

One other note. On the Macs, for some reason when they re-connect after being rebooted, the client seems to try to connect with port 5191 for some reason. So if you just rebooted your classic Mac and it's not connecting anymore, verify that it's still trying to use port 5190.

From my understanding, you could connect to the OSCAR services on pretty much any port back in the day. This was done in order to help clients get past firewall restrictions. So it seems like the macos client might default to a different port if it thinks there were connection issues.

Right now RAS has specific ports for different services (5190-5197). Soon I will refactor the server so that all OSCAR services can be addressable on a single port, which can enable server operators to configure their servers to accept connections on any port.