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Improve Your Xbox 360 Experience with Port Forwarding
Posted by Adam Pash at 1:00 AM on July 13, 2008
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. While you're at it, you may be interested in tweaking your router to ensure your Xbox gets the lion's share of your bandwidth when you need it. Finally, now that you're gaming is set up for top performance, maybe it's time you do more than just game on your 360.
Tags: fix | games | port forwarding | router | xbox | xbox 360
Comments (AU Comments · US Comments)
Harvey
Posted July 15, 2008 3:53 PM
i tried using TVersity a while ago to stream Xvids to my 360 and it JUST WOULD NOT WORK. reading this inspired me to try again and it worked like clockwork. i don't know why, maybe because its a new version. but thanks, it works great and is very cool.
Harlan
Posted 2:10 AM 13/7/08
The part of their article that's retarded/inaccurate is the implementation of port ranges. If port 88 needs to be forwarded, and you have to express it as a range, you use 88-88 as the range, not 87-89. A range of ports is always going to be inclusive. I was expecting more from this article.
Harlan
Barron
Posted 2:01 AM 13/7/08
Most of the "hard" work here is just forwarding the port on your router, so you can do this for anything with a static IP. So this is a useful tip for those using a PS3 (and probably a list of other devices) for their gaming/media needs.
Barron
imdante
Posted 2:20 AM 13/7/08
This is just an "FYI" for anybody that cares: PortForward.com seems to cover just about every router out there and gives a step by step guide for a huge range of applications.
imdante
KennyM
Posted 2:17 AM 13/7/08
Yeah, the range part sounds like they don't know what they're doing. In most cases when people don't know what they're doing, they go a little overboard. I need port 88? and a range? Let's open 1-1024 just in case it wants more.
KennyM
Digitarius
Posted 11:59 PM 14/7/08
@Harlan: To be fair, this is a "safe" setting. While I agree 90% of routers will consider it inclusive (as it should be) You cannot always predict router behavior. I had some beige thing from my DSL company for a while that would not consider the range inclusive.
Of course, that's also why you probably shouldn't be using whatever hunk of crap the ISP issues to you.
Digitarius
Digitarius
Posted 11:56 PM 14/7/08
I usually recommend giving your 360 a static IP address and assigning it to your router's DMZ. The nice thing about a DMZ is that anything that's not explicitly forwarded somewhere else will end up hitting your Xbox.
And the nice thing about the Xbox is that it runs in "stealth mode" anyway, so you're not opening up yourself to any kind of security vulnerability at all.
Digitarius
McKack
Posted 11:50 PM 14/7/08
It looks like I'm doomed to be stuck with NAT Moderate unfortunately because I use my Mac to share it's (wireless) Internet connection. And opening the ports on my 3Com doesn't help since the IP range can't be the same on the router and the Xbox :\
Router -> (Mac wireless) en1 (192.168.1.1 -> 192.168.1.64)
(Mac wired) en0 -> Xbox (192.168.2.1 -> 192.168.2.4)
What's annoying though I'm sure there's some trickery that can be done in the terminal with ipfw and natd but I've got no clue how to use them, not even with the help of the man command.
I've also tried forwarding with programs such as Little Snitch and tried several scripts and natd.conf files I found on the web to no avail. Perhaps some Mac guru here has the answer though? =D
McKack
nicknackpaddyHack
Posted 3:20 AM 15/7/08
@Digitarius: My 360 is set up on the DMZ, however, I have never heard about the "stealth mode" before. I was never really to concerned about it.
Anyone looking to set up their 360 is better off looking to the xbox technical forums than here.
nicknackpaddyHack