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[Bowdon]

I haven't had to deal with this issue yet. But I can see it being an issue soon for quite a lot of people and I'm wondering what the solution is.

Port 80 and 443 seem to be popular ports when it comes to games. The problem comes when there are multiple devices that play games and at some point both games have requested access to these ports.

Port forwarding it can only forward the port to one internal IP address. Most routers won't allow for a double entry to forward to a second IP address.

So what is the solution to this situation? How do people get around it.

I know about port triggering. This can be a good solution if 2 devices are on the network and use the port at different times. Is this the only solution?

[aesmith]

Depending on your equipment you might be able to make the translation dependent on the source address as well as destination.  I haven't done this myself for inbound translations.

[Weaver]

Apart from the obvious "don't use NAT" (at all). A lot of ISPs have had to cut back on their IPv4 allocations though of course.

[ejs]

Do they actually need inbound connections to port 80 (HTTP) and 443 (HTTPS) though? Normally a program would need admin privileges to listen on ports below 1024. Sometimes the list of ports that need to be "open" for a game contains common ports like 80, 443, 53 (DNS), when it seems likely they only send outbound packets to those ports, so they don't need to be forwarded.

[gt94sss2]

Apart from the obvious "don't use NAT" (at all). A lot of ISPs have had to cut back on their IPv4 allocations though of course.

Most ISPs will only give their customers one IPv4 address - whether that's dynamic or static.

But back to the original question- don't most people just use UPnP rather than forwarding ports?

[ejs]

UPnP would have the same limitation, that a port could only be forwarded to one device at the same time, it just sets up the port forwarding automatically.

[WWWombat]

I guess a well constructed app would use uPnP in a flexible way - either dynamically choosing a port for incoming access, or allowing it to be configurable.

An app that only functioned with a single port is asking for trouble - especially it the port it chooses is one of the well-known ones.

[d2d4j]

Hi

UPnP should work well for multiple games consoles.

If you check Xbox forum, they advise UPnP and to change your router if UPnP is not supported.

I hope that helps

Many thanks

John

[Bowdon]

Thanks for the good information guys.

I remember that I turned off UPNP a year ago when a game, I think one of the FIFA games (I think '15 version) would have some glitchy freezing in the menu's on the demo. I'm not sure why that happened but I remember turning off UPNP solved the issue.

I'll have to try the UPNP again sometime if I run in to difficulties.

[d2d4j]

Hi

If using UPnP, please remember UPnP does not play well if port forwarding/triggering is already setup, so if UPnP does not appear to work well, check your port forwarding/triggering for any rules which use same port as game etc, and remove them.

Many thanks

John

[Weaver]

I wish more games designers would get on and use IPv6, to start some momentum going. Teredo has turned out with fairly rubbish performance, for some users at least. There are noises that the big ISPs are finally going to do it. But the amount of app developers' effort wasted on trying to struggle with NAT is incredible.