Re: Gaming Consoles and IPv4

[Daniel Sterling <sterling.daniel () gmail com>]

Matt Hoppes raises an interesting question,

At the risk of this being off-topic, in the latest call of duty games I've
played, their UDP-NAT-breaking algorithm seems to work rather well and
should function fine even behind CGNAT. Ironically turning on upnp makes
this *worse*, because when their algorithm probes to see what ports to use,
upnp sends all traffic from the "magical xbox port" to one box instead of
letting NAT control the ports. This does cause problems when multiple
xboxes are behind one NAT doing upnp. If upnp is on and both xboxes are
fully powered off and then turned on one at a time, things do work. But
when upnp is off everything works w/o having to do that.

There are many other games and many CPE NAT boxes that may do horrible
things, but CGNAT by itself shouldn't cause problems for any recent device
/ gaming system.

It is true that I've yet to see any FPS game use ipv6. I assume that's cuz
they can't count on users having v6, so they have to support v4, and it
wouldn't be worth their while to have their gaming host support dual-stack.
just a guess there

-- Dan



On Sun, Sep 27, 2020 at 7:29 PM Mike Hammett <nanog () ics-il net> wrote:

> Actually, uPNP is the only way to get two devices to work behind one
> public IP, at least with XBox 360s. I haven't kept up in that realm.
>
>
>
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> ------------------------------
> *From: *"Matt Hoppes" <mattlists () rivervalleyinternet net>
> *To: *"Darin Steffl" <darin.steffl () mnwifi com>
> *Cc: *"North American Network Operators' Group" <nanog () nanog org>
> *Sent: *Sunday, September 27, 2020 1:22:51 PM
> *Subject: *Re: Gaming Consoles and IPv4
>
> I understand that. But there’s a host of reasons why that night not work -
> two devices trying to use UPNP behind the same PAT device, an apartment
> complex or hotel WiFi system, etc.
>
> On Sep 27, 2020, at 2:17 PM, Darin Steffl <darin.steffl () mnwifi com> wrote:
>
> 
> This isn't rocket science.
>
> Give each customer their own ipv4 IP address and turn on upnp, then they
> will have open NAT to play their game and host.
>
> On Sun, Sep 27, 2020, 12:50 PM Matt Hoppes <
> mattlists () rivervalleyinternet net> wrote:
>
> > I know the solution is always “IPv6”, but I’m curious if anyone here
> > knows why gaming consoles are so stupid when it comes to IPv4?
> >
> > We have VoIP and video systems that work fine through multiple layers of
> > PAT and NAT. Why do we still have gaming consoles, in 2020, that can’t find
> > their way through a PAT system with STUN or other methods?
> >
> > It seems like this should be a simple solution, why are we still opening
> > ports or having systems that don’t work?