Help with my NAT

Spoom182

I sometimes have trouble playing Halo 3 online with friends, and I've seen a little dialogue box come up and warn me that my NAT is moderate. I just need some help setting it to Open. I have a linksys WRT54G router, and I'm not quite a master of all this networking lingo so keep it simple, if you can. Thanks.

Dark Shroud

You might need to set your 360 is use a static IP. How many computers do you have connected to your router, obviously we're not counting the 360 because it's only a pretend computer (j/k).

darkgrue

With the XBOX 360, Microsoft have defined three categories of NAT. These are Strict, Moderate, and Open. You can see the NAT level for your XBOX Live connection by going into your System blade -> Network Settings -> Test Xbox Live Connection.

To be able to chat or play online with a friend you will need to have compatable NAT connections. The table below shows such compatability with each XBOX 360 NAT category:

-              To Open  To Moderate  To Strict 
From Open      YES      YES           YES 
From Moderate  YES      YES           NO 
From Strict     YES      NO            NO

The ports that Microsoft recommends to be open are:

88 UDP
3074 UDP
3074 TCP

If your router has UPnP (most have it off by default), you can turn it on, and you may not need to do anything else.

Otherwise, you can forward the ports above to your Xbox 360 (you'll need to assign your Xbox 360 a static IP address on your home network for this to work), and try testing the connection again.

Based on the chart above though, it's not necessarily you with the NAT problem, so much as your friends don't have NAT set up right themselves...

Hranj

I had this same exact problem with my Netgear router when I first got it but it was while I was playing Halo 2. I would constantly lag out of games or disconnect for no apparent reason.

The only solution I found was to go onto the Netgear website and update the firmware that was on the router. XBOX has some type of "certification" that it gives certain hardware when it performs optimally on it. Something like "XBOX Approved."

But anyway, what I'm getting at is go to the Linksys website and search around for the newest firmware you can and update it. This fixed the problem on my Netgear router and hopefully it does it for you too. Best of luck!

Transparent

Many have learned the hard way the lastest rarely means greatest when it comes to linksys official firmware, that's why projects like DD-WRT and Tomato exist.