as it is presently impossible to sign myself up for the jjira bugtracker, I'll just file the bug here.

I have an issue with skype communication and status messages within a home/office network

This is the situation:

desktop running Feisty and skype linux 1.4 alpha

laptop running feisty and skype linux 1..4 alpha.

they are on the same home network, laptop using wireless connection or wired, desktop only wired.
they have their ports forwarded (desktop: 12000, laptop: 32173), told skype to listen on these ports.

desktop is online 24/7 as are some of the contacts that are on that list and that are not on my network. whenever any one of those people signs off, it indeed changes status rather accurately (i.e. I see them going offline from MSN or ICQ at about the same time).

when I connect to Skype from a separate account on the laptop, I have the same situation. Contacts on that list show up and their presence is accurate.

However, the status that my laptop and desktop show towards eachother are incorrect. Mostly it takes a while for either one to show up for the other. It helps whenever I attempt o call the other one even while it shows offline, it suddenly shows online and rings. When I cancel the call and leave the laptop untouched, it takes exactly 5 minutes before it shows offline again on the desktop. Trying to call to the laptop again doesn't help its reappearance on the desktop's contactlist, although I am still able to place calls from the laptop to anyone outside of the home network. to reenable desktop - laptop communication I have to kill and restart one of them. the 5 minute interval before showing offline is very reproducible.

anyone recognize this problem, better yet, know a solution !? I'm not sure if this is a linux specific issue. reports by others (also with windows version) do not discriminate between contacts on internal networks and outside, so don't know if this is the same.

This is known problem on internal networks. There is no solution yet, so all I can recommend is when you need to ping another internal network contact to bring its status to online - give it a call.

OK did some more testing and indeed problem is not linux specific, also have it when I use the windows version on either one or both.

so I was wondering, I'm just a home user so it's no real big deal. But say if you want to implement skype in your company or institue but colleagues on the same network can't see eachother's status or place calls, it would become pretty unusable, right ?

It depends on the scale and complexity of the network. Most problematic are, iirc, simple networks with several skypes behind a single NATted firewall, which does not have skype ports open on the outside.

As an experiment - try setting all your skypes to use single port number for incoming connections (on Linux: options > advanced > use port 23399 for incoming connections) and then open this incoming port on your router. You should have consistent online statuses then.

As an experiment - try setting all your skypes to use single port number for incoming connections (on Linux: options > advanced > use port 23399 for incoming connections) and then open this incoming port on your router. You should have consistent online statuses then.
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thanks, this indeed seems to help (to my surprise). I was sceptic if it would work, cause my router only allows me to forward the specific port to one client. so now both clients are listening on port 12000 and I have the outside port 12000 of the router forwarded to the desktop. I am curious about the explanation of this success.

PS, not related to this topic, but I noticed that the 1.4 version seems to require minimal resources. I have it running on a Duron 900 with apr. 10% CPU usage during a call. I remember that when I had the windows version running on it, it would already consume 50-60% when not even in a call, accepting a call generally led to an unresponsive system. good work!