Port Forwarding Durp

Zen Vulgarity

I'm not a wizard at forwarding ports or networking issues but:

On my router, I used a preset port for a TCP/UDP connection at 5190, and forwarded it to my LAN IP address at 192.168.0.X whatever. It says that the forwarding is active buttttt when I check it, the port looks to be closed. I never had a problem like this on my old router, but this one is straight from time Warner.

Any reason why this would be? Any way around it? It's made playing League of Legends unbearable since the game will choke repeatedly.

mspencer

It's possible your ISP is filtering incoming traffic to that port. That would cause the port to appear closed.

It's also possible (but really unlikely) that a firewall on your computer (Windows firewall?) is blocking the traffic when it arrives.

When someone out on the public Internet sends you a packet, it has to go through your ISP, then your border gateway, then to your PC. Your ISP might drop it; your router might drop it; or your PC might drop it. Enabling port forwarding just means you KNOW your router won't be dropping it. It doesn't say anything about the other links in the chain.

Zen Vulgarity

Oh bugger I knew I was forgetting to turn of some settings on this computer. I'll futz around with that sort of thing later.

Edit: Nope. It's saying the connection is being actively refused.

mspencer

So that connection is either being actively refused by your ISP (that is, remote end sends a TCP SYN and gets a TCP RESET back, from your ISP that is) or it's being actively refused by your router (port forwarding not really working) or your PC (firewall blocking the connection, or PC not actually listening on that port.)

Zen Vulgarity

Well I deliberately had removed the firewalls on my computer to see if that was the culprit and it wasn't. Also, this had not been a problem in my old residence, so I'm assuming it's either the ISP or the router. I'll give them a call tonight I suppose.

bowen

Also, some routers make a distinction between the 'outside' and 'inside' interfaces and the port needs to be open in both of those.

Zen Vulgarity

It's an SMC 8014 if that helps anything!

I'll put this on hold until I call tonight and cry to them.

bowen

Well, that's the AOL/ICQ port, so, it should be kosher with the ISP. The only thing I can think of is the port's not forwarded correctly but with the SMC that seems pretty straight forward.

See if this helps you:
http://portforward.com/english/routers/port_forwarding/SMC/SMC8014/Utorrent.htm

Zen Vulgarity

That's the thing! I did all that.

vonPoonBurGer

Do you have anything listening on that port on your internal system? You may have it correctly forwarded, but if there's no process listening on 5190 on your desktop then the result of a port scan is still going to say that 5190 is closed. The only difference is that now the port scan is getting the RST packet from the desktop and not the router. In other words, make sure you're running the game when you're doing the port scan. Also note that the game may not start actively listening on that port until you try to connect to a multiplayer game.

You can tell if anything is listening on 5190 by opening a command prompt on the destination PC and running netstat -an. If you see something like one of the following, then your system has some process that's listening on port 5190:

TCP    0.0.0.0:5190           0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING
TCP    192.168.0.X:5190       0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING
UDP    0.0.0.0:5190          *:*
UDP    192.168.0.X:5190       *:*

Note that 0.0.0.0 is shorthand for "all interfaces", so 0.0.0.0:5190 means your system is listening on that port on all active network interfaces. A specific IP plus ":5190" means your system is listening on that port, but just on the interface with that specific IP. If you see "127.0.0.1:5190" it means your system is listening on that port, but only for loopback traffic from other process on the same system. Some apps use loopback traffic as a means of communicating between processes or threads, but a remote port scan will never find an open loopback port because it's local-only.

Something else that might help is to fire up the game, try to connect to a multiplayer session and see what ports the game is active on. You can do this from a command prompt by running netstat -abn. It's pretty much the same info as -an, but it also tries to track back each open port to a running process ID & executable name. Maybe your game is listening on a different port than the one you expected, or more than one port?

Zen Vulgarity

After calling them they had told me they don't "allow port forwarding"

After berating them about how that's not protecting their customers, but limiting them, and clearly horseshit, I've been on hold for 30 minutes.

TeaSpoon

Wait, I don't get it. How can they not allow port forwarding? Does that mean you can only use the internet applications they allow you to use? Who are they to make that decision? Are they saying that all their customers must have hardware firewalls on routers/modems? What if you turn it off? Are you able to turn it off?

Phyphor

Well they could do it fairly easily actually, they would just have a router on their side that drops all incoming packets not part of an existing connection. It's an incredibly shitty thing of them to do though

Zen Vulgarity

Well I'm going to yell at them this week about it. Also, I've noticed something.

Most applications run fine, but certain games go to shit. Would the rather large uplink buffer be the cause of it?

http://n1.netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/summary/id=43ca253f-5263-6a0e8762-5175-41f1-a106#BufferResult

Phyphor

Potentially, that's an insane amount of delay for anything realtime. Of course it says mine has 6100ms and I have no problems, but then they could only upload at 10 kbit for some reason

stigweard

Zen Vulgarity wrote: »

Well I'm going to yell at them this week about it. Also, I've noticed something.

Most applications run fine, but certain games go to shit. Would the rather large uplink buffer be the cause of it?

http://n1.netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu/summary/id=43ca253f-5263-6a0e8762-5175-41f1-a106#BufferResult

The short answer is there is nothing wrong with that if you have asynchronous internet (much higher download than upload). The only problem it can cause is that it can completely kill your internet if you are constantly uploading at your maximum bandwidth with multiple connections (ie bitorrent).

Zen Vulgarity

Well I'm not much of a torrenting person to begin with, unless the application calls for it (I think blizzard downloader is a torrent program for example).

bowen

If your games are going to shit zen, QoS might be to blame for that. However, if they're blackballing you so you can't do anything, just tell them you're going to change (or downright cancel your subscription). Most have retention groups and they'll give you free stuff if this isn't a big deal for you.

Port 5190 though? That's the AOL/AIM/ICQ port, there is no reason why that should be blocked. Especially from time warner. But, if you're trying to listen to your router and run a server on that port, you might have issues if they don't allow port forwarding at all.

Zen Vulgarity

What's really weird is that it's not even company-wide policy to do that.

bowen

Well, most ISPs not for commercial use will say, "It's against the ToS to run a server on our internet." Perhaps the rep you got was repeating that verbatim. But, all you should say to combat that is "I'm using this to play games online and blocking port 5190 is not allowing me to host a game and I'm not happy. I think I'll switch to your competition XYZ because they don't do this."

Zen Vulgarity

You seem to be forgetting about local monopolies for these kinds of things.

bowen

Ah yes, well, there's always dialup.

Zen Vulgarity

Downloads are perfectly fine

It's really just this one game for the most part

I'm going to probably call them, call them on their throttling, and tell them their service is worthless if I can't do the hobby I want