XBox Live, NAT, Strict vs Moderate vs Open
I’ve been having trouble joining Call of Duty 3 games with friends, and went digging to figure out why. Turns out it was my router’s firmware.
I have a WRT54G v2.0 router, and I’ve been running the HyperWRT firmware since back when I was fighting with trying to get good quality of service for voice calls with Vonage.
Many forums tell you to get XBox Live working over a router all you need to do is forward UDP port 88 and both TCP and UDP on port 3074. But it’s not that simple – that didn’t fix it for me. I had UPnP turned on, had those ports forwarded, but the XBox network diagnostic still said Moderate for the NAT.
I found this excellent page that describes the difference between cone and symmetric shapped NAT, which is very interesting reading, but didn’t really answer the question. But I figured this might be one of the differences between HyperWRT and the default Linksys firmware, so I updated to the latest firmware from Linksys (http://www.linksys.com/download/) and lo and behold, that fixed it.
The Microsoft Compatible Home Networking Equipment page is actually useful here – it shows which routers they’ve tested and know work.
May 5th, 2008 at 4:46 am
Hey bro thank you so much. I’ve been having the same problem… I was stuck with a moderate nat for a LONG time. I guess a simple upgrade did the job ahahaha.
October 11th, 2008 at 10:36 am
Well I got the v4 of that and I got the firmware updated but for me I still have moderate, I’ve done many things to set it to open but to no avail, the moderate NAT still ignores all I’ve put out from what I’ve done so far… If anyone has anything else… HELP ME END THIS MODERATE NIGHTMARE! Cause I’m sick of it.
October 11th, 2008 at 11:22 am
Ah the UPnP was flawed so it is to be disabled, thank goodness it is all over…