chat clients - cannot connect

Don't know if this is a TDE issue or not, but maybe somebody here can tell me what's going on. Suddenly all my jabber/xmpp accounts have stopped working. I thought maybe it was that the servers had gone down, so I went and registered some new accounts at other servers, and got several accounts registered, but most of them also won't connect. I did have 2 old accounts that still worked, and 1 new account, but then in the past day two of these accounts have also stopped working. Now the only one I have that works now is the very first one that I registered about 15 years ago. Error messages I get are either: There was a connection error: Network failure. -or- no authentication method available (or something like that) I've been exchanging emails with one of the techs for one of the servers, and was asked if I use IPv4 or IPv6. As it happens, I disable IPv6 on this system, because I cannot find a firewall that does what I want yet (like firestarter). Do I really have to use IPv6? I hear that they are running out of addresses, but until now my system has been running pretty well. I've tried psi, pidgin, etc. (to make sure that it's not an issue with Kopete), but I still get the same errors. However, it could still be an issue with Trinity. I've never had problems with certificates and all that, but I also never gave it much thought. Any clues about what is the problem? Bill P.S. running Devuan Jessie with Trinity R14.0.6