Improve Your Xbox 360 Experience with Port Forwarding Options

[Xbox-Scene]

Improve Your Xbox 360 Experience with Port Forwarding Posted by XanTium | July 12 21:26 EST | News Category: Xbox360

From lifehacker.com: [QUOTE] Wired's How-To Wiki details step-by-step how to set up port forwarding to make sure you're getting the best experience from your Xbox 360 and Xbox Live game play. Depending on your router you may never have needed to do this, but if you've ever experienced long wait-times between games and other suspicious network problems, there's a fair chance that a quick trip through your router's settings could make a big difference. [/QUOTE] Full Story: lifehacker.com | howto.wired.com

[Lezlyte]

An often overlooked part of Xbox Live. This can change your NAT setting and allow easier matchmaking. Also useful for Windows Live. (Trust me, it took a while for me to figure out why my Halo 2 Vista couldn't update...)

[GOVATENT]

i just setup the 360 as the dmz. my router is set not to respond to pings on the wan port. i don't know if the dmz by passes that setting. but i don't turn it off cause I have logged many hacks on my ip in the past. Bruteforce and all sorts of stuff.

[HotKnife420]

i just setup the 360 as the dmz. my router is set not to respond to pings on the wan port. i don't know if the dmz by passes that setting. but i don't turn it off cause I have logged many hacks on my ip in the past. Bruteforce and all sorts of stuff.

Using DMZ can be a double-edged sword, sometimes. Essentially, you're placing [in your case, your 360] outside of your local network, so there's no firewall in-between. This can be good for things such as a 360, because you don't really need a firewall protecting it, but at the same time, placing it outside your network could cause issues with things such as streaming. For me, DMZ just doesn't work like it does for some.

Kinda surprised this is news, considering this has been asked countless times in the forums, but it's still good to help anybody new, so I'd say it's front page worthy, whether it's news or not

[africamagical]

thats why mine is on dmz

[rumblpak]

Except for the fact that your range can be from 3074-3074 so you dont use extra ports its a decent tutorial; however if your router supports dhcp based on mac address you can set the port to forward to whatever ip your xbox is on at the time and not have to set a manual ip. it saves time if you go places with your xbox / computer.

[GMANLS20]

Poor article certainly not worthy of front page news.

1) Port forwarding usually isn't necessary if you have a decent router with a UPnP option, one tick of that option and your done
2) It over complicates how to assign a manual ip address
3) The port range isn't specific enough you don't "span" ranges when you only want to forward a single port
4) The IP Address shown to access your router settings is only for Linksys, no comments on how to access other routers (there's lots of em)

There's much better articles on the net, just type xbox live nat into google

Whilst some people will have to port forward it shouldn't be your first choice and as Portforward.com already cover this topic in more accurate detail (and for more routers) I see no point in re-inventing it again

[steveju]

Poor article certainly not worthy of front page news.

Agreed.

4) The IP Address shown to access your router settings is only for Linksys, no comments on how to access other routers (there's lots of em)

I think that portforward.com has a list of many known routers.

[koolkid1935]

Another thing it doesn't cover is if there are multiple devices (Xbox/Xbox 360/Windows Live) that need to get onto the Live network. It should go into or at least touch base with port triggering as well IMO.

[MrFish]

Another thing it doesn't cover is if there are multiple devices (Xbox/Xbox 360/Windows Live) that need to get onto the Live network. It should go into or at least touch base with port triggering as well IMO.

UPNP is by far the best solution in this case. If your UPNPd is working properly (yes, linux-igd, I'm looking in your direction*), then the second device to ask for the LIVE port will get back a 'no, you can't have this port' packet, and will try again with a new, random one.

Thusly you can have as many devices as you like behind your router, they can all get on LIVE at the same time, and you can even play in the same games, because the outside world sees distinct machines on different ports. And you don't have to worry about static IPs: if your friend brings his 360, you can plug it in and it will Just Work.

That, and it's way easier to flick the 'UPNP' switch to on than it is to faff about with assigning IP addresses and port mappings.

And that using UPNP is supported by the fantastic dudes at Microsoft's support, which will make phoning them up marginally less unpleasant.


* linux-igd's upnpd simply hands out the same port to everything that asks for it, and blithely appends rule after rule (for the same port!) to its IPTable. But IPTables match from top to bottom, so not only is the second device told it can use a port which it can't, but when it logs on to LIVE, all its incoming data gets sent to the first device! miniupnpd is not brain-damaged, and correctly refuses to map a port it's already given out to someone else.

[Agent ME]

Does anyone have a good program that can query the router's UPNP information to tell things like what ports have been forwarded and what IPs have reserved them? Anything like that for linux? That would be useful for simple debugging and seeing if the router is supporting things correctly.

This post has been edited by Agent ME: Jul 13 2008, 10:33 PM

[Martinchris23]

Does anyone have a good program that can query the router's UPNP information to tell things like what ports have been forwarded and what IPs have reserved them? Anything like that for linux? That would be useful for simple debugging and seeing if the router is supporting things correctly.

If you've a good router, it should advise you as to what IPs and ports have been reserved under uPnP.

Linksys owners are advised to try out the dd-wrt firmware as it's feature-rich.

[Lezlyte]

Poor article certainly not worthy of front page news.

1) Port forwarding usually isn't necessary if you have a decent router with a UPnP option, one tick of that option and your done
2) It over complicates how to assign a manual ip address
3) The port range isn't specific enough you don't "span" ranges when you only want to forward a single port
4) The IP Address shown to access your router settings is only for Linksys, no comments on how to access other routers (there's lots of em)

There's much better articles on the net, just type xbox live nat into google

Whilst some people will have to port forward it shouldn't be your first choice and as Portforward.com already cover this topic in more accurate detail (and for more routers) I see no point in re-inventing it again

1. And if you don't have such a router? My Netgear router has UPnP but I still needed to set up port forwarding to change my NAT from Strict to Open and on my computer to allow Windows Live to work.

2. Nothing is ever over-complicated for a newbie to networking. Years back just trying to FTP to my Xbox1 took 5 hours to figure out. Not because I'm stupid, but there is a severe lack of clear information on how IP adresses work.

3. I agree, and most routers you don't even need a range for.

4. They could fix this by saying the most common addresses are 192.168.1.1 or 192.168.0.1, but check your router's manual.

[Agent ME]

If you've a good router, it should advise you as to what IPs and ports have been reserved under uPnP.

Linksys owners are advised to try out the dd-wrt firmware as it's feature-rich.

I got a Linksys router, WRT54G v6, which doesn't have much firmware space, so I don't think DD-WRT will work from last time I checked. Stupid linksys firmware seems lacking in some areas - but it does have support for DDNS sites (like dyndns.org) which is nice...

[kutje]

this is nothing news indeed, i expected more an article howto use QOS, priority packets. since i share my internet with my roommates i cant bareley play on live anymore.