Sonicwall access rules for Yahoo! IM

A customer running Yahoo! Instant Messenger found that he was getting logged out constantly, and he tracked it down to the NAT timeouts in his Soniwall Pro VX firewall. By extending the NAT timeout, we were able to make this problem go away entirely.

This Tech Tips shows how to navigate the Sonicwall web-based admin menus.

Connect to the Sonicwall with your web browser.
Login the admin user and your administrator password.
Click the Access button on the left
Click the Add Service tab at the top
Scroll through the list of services on the right side, and if "Yahoo! IM" doesn't appear, the service must be added. This step doesn't change any access rules in its own right, but it does enable the Yahoo! IM service in the rules section which follows.
Click the Rules tab at the top. Scroll to the bottom and click Add New Rule, and fill in the dialog box as shown here:

If your dialog box has no "Inactivity Timeout" section, you're probably running old firmware: please upgrade. Newer Sonicwalls may have a section on "bandwidth management" - this is not relevant so has been edited out here.

Very old Sonicwalls may require a reboot of the whole unit to make this take effect: these need a firmware upgrade badly. Otherwise this should take effect immediately.

This is addressed indirectly at the Yahoo! IM Help Center.

Thanks to Steve Gardiner for the information upon which this Tech Tip was based.

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