[VPN] UPnP over Sonicwall VPN

[Seth Robinson]

Hey Guys,

I was having a Messenger problem a while back, and was told to open up
some ports, and to also allow SIP through my firewall (SonicWALL).  I
did this, and it still didn't work.  I did a little more research and
found out quite a bit of interesting info.  First off, we were trying to
do A/V conferencing through windows messenger.  We were using WM 4.6,
but then upgraded to WM 4.7.  We have our own IM server.  Apparently 4.7
is the first version to make use of UPnP, universal plug and play.
Basically what this does is dynamically assigns UDP ports 5004 to 65535
for everything from A/V conversations to white board sharing,  There by
allowing it to connect without having to worry about what ports are
already in use.  Herein lays the problem.  SonicWALL is not UPnP
compatible.  It does not recognize what messenger is trying to do, and
doesn't know what ports are trying to be used and instead blocks it.  My
question is, since it is possible to get UPnP compatible routers, would
it possibly work to set one up behind the SonicWALL, have all nodes on
that LAN use it as their gateway, and then set the router's gateway to
be the SonicWALL, do the same thing for the other side of the VPN, and
then open up all ports between those two IP addresses, and leave
everything else closed.

Sorry to be so long-winded, but please tell me what your thoughts are...

Thanks a ton,
Seth R.