Outbound policy question for Skype on Balance 310

Hello,

I have a Balance 310 with 3 WAN connections (2 DSL, 1 Satellite). I want to route Skype traffic to the 2 DSL connections due to the latency issue on the satellite connection. My Skype traffic is limited to a single computer and I have a DHCP reservation for that machine to ensure it is always at the same IP address. I setup an outbound rule using that IP address as the source. The protocol is set to UDP and the single port is set to 18999 (which is what I have Skype configured to use on that machine). I’ve tried Weighted Balance, Priority, and even Enforced algorithms enabling only WAN1 or WAN2 and none of them seem to work. Regardless of what algorithm I try, I end up with Skype connections on WAN3 which is the satellite connection. This rule is the second highest priority.

The other rule pertaining to this machine is Default which is weighted balance which does allocate equal time to WAN3. Since this rule is lower priority than the Skype rule, I thought the higher priority rule would take precedence.

When I check the Active Sessions screen, I see the following:

UDP 192.168.1.21:18999 … WAN 3

Can someone help me figure out what I am doing wrong?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Mark

I believe the single port setting of 18999 in Skype is only a listening port for incoming connections, not outbound. I believe Skype will use a random port above 1024 for outbound connections.

Not a Skype expert here though, maybe someone else can confirm…

As a work around, I would set a rule using the priority algorithm for 192.168.1.21 to go out the DSL connection choosing any source/destination/port.