Skype performance tuning

[Guillaume]

Good morning everyone,

I've been testing a PA-200 unit here and I have a certain issue with Skype, which is mostly due to Skype being very weird about how it uses the network.

Most threads I found around here are about blocking or controlling Skype somehow, but my question is the opposite.

How would you configure your firewall to ensure that Skype gets good "UDP Status" locally? (can be seen in the technical call information).

I've configured Skype to use a specific high port, and created a NAT rule to forward that back to my machine (not very scalable as a solution but it was my first test) and that part works, I see UDP connections on that port, yet Skype still reports UDP status as BAD locally, and on the firewall I see tons of attempted UDP on many random ports.

Is there any way to have Skype (maybe the Mac version is worse - It doesn't have a lot of the features the Windows one has like not being a supernode etc) not report bad UDP status behind a firewall?

If so, can it also be done for multiple users or does it require specific NAT forwarding rules?

Thanks

[bjdraw]

I have the same problem and confirmed that configuring the Skype client to use a specific UDP port to listen on and then creating a NAT rule to forward traffic to that port on the computer with the Skype client, greatly improves the picture quality (and a UDP relay isn't indicated in Technical Call info). I'd really like a more scalable way to improve my user's Skype conference calls (that are used to communicate with offshore staff) then creating inbound NAT rules for each user.