I use Trillian as my instant messaging client. It allows me to be signed in with both Yahoo and Microsoft messaging without having to have two clients running.

A problem I had been having with it was after waking my laptop from hibernation, the Microsoft connection would fail to reconnect. Yahoo would reconnect without problem, but Microsoft would keep trying for about 10 minutes before finally failing. If I did a Global Disconnect before hibernating and then a Global Reconnect after waking it up, then everything worked fine.

Well it worked fine providing I remembered to reconnect after waking up. This didn’t always happen, as my post a few days ago about my unexpected Plugoo message shows.

Looking at the logs for the MSN connection shows:

[20:46] *** Lost connection to network (Error Code: 10054).
[20:46] *** Reconnecting to MSN as “*****@********.com”
[20:46] *** Will attempt 10 connections with 60 second intervals.
[20:46] *** Failure resolving “messenger.hotmail.com”! Attempting to connect to a known server…
[20:46] *** Connecting to MSN as “*****@********.com”, attempt 1.
[20:46] *** Error while connecting (Error Code: 0). Disconnecting.
[20:48] *** Connecting to MSN as “*****@********.com”, attempt 2.
[20:48] *** Error while connecting (Error Code: 0). Disconnecting.
[20:49] *** Connecting to MSN as “*****@********.com”, attempt 3.
[20:49] *** Error while connecting (Error Code: 0). Disconnecting.
[20:50] *** Connecting to MSN as “*****@********.com”, attempt 4.
[20:51] *** Error while connecting (Error Code: 0). Disconnecting.

It appears that as the system comes out of hibernation, Trillian attempts to do a DNS lookup for messenger.hotmail.com. As the network connection hasn’t been re-established, the lookup fails and then it tries to connect to MSN using a different address. It never tries the lookup again and fails to get a response on the address it uses.

Checking the ip address for messenger.hotmail.com

nslookup messenger.hotmail.com
Server: xxxx.xxxxxxx.xxxxxx
Address: 192.168.1.3
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: dp.msnmessenger.akadns.net
Address: 65.54.239.20
Aliases: messenger.hotmail.com

This gave me the IP address 65.54.239.20 for messenger.hotmail.com

I then changed the entry for the MSN host in Trillian. In Trillian preferences, select Identities and Connections, select your Microsoft connection and press Change.

On the connection tab, I changed the host entry from messenger.hotmail.com to 65.54.239.20.

Since making this change, Trillian reconnects the Microsoft connection within a minute automatically after waking from hibernation.