XR500 - XBox Configuration. To ipv6 or not to ipv6.

[KennyUbstrd1]

Greetings,

 

I'm a noob to the XR500 (about a week now) and this forum.  In an attempt to improve my gaming experience I went to replace my old Netgear router with the Linksys WRT32xb and simply could not get good performance out of it.  I then returned the Linksys and replaced it with the XR500. The router, the dumaOS, and the interface are great.  

 

Can someone provide feedback as to how I have my XR500 configured, especially as it applies to Titanfall 2. I have 100 down, 10 up from Comcast and am using a Netgear CM600 modem to connect to the router. The XBox X is hard wired from the router to the console. 

 

Taking this in order of the settings pages:

 

- I have the DNS pointed to google on both the router and XBX.

- The XBX reserved ip address is entered as the DMZ, my NAT is set to open, and I have reserved the XBX ip address in the LAN section.

- UPnP is on

- Although I used Port Forwarding with my old router, I found that doing this with the XR500 decreased performance.

- Anti-buffer bloat is set to 60% both ways and I have allocated 60% of up/down to my console (please don't tell my wife)

- I am in spectating mode and the Geofilter is set to the TF2 default.

- I do have my ipv6  active, but I've read in some of these forums to turn it off. My service does provide ipv6 and was used with my old router.

 

The dashboard indicates that my ping usually ranges between 50-60, but will spike in the 100's.  Oddly, the first night I used the router my ping was at about 40.  XBX gives me a latency of ~52.

 

Any sage advice would be appreciated!

 

Thanks,

 

c

 

[Netduma Fraser]

Hey, welcome to the forum!

 

I would absolutely recommend you disable IPv6. It's not fully supported by DumaOS features and could therefore explain the ping increases.

[KennyUbstrd1]

Thanks for the quick response.  If (when) I disable ipv6 should I re-enable port forwarding?  If so, do you have a recommended configuration?

[Netduma Fraser]

Thanks for the quick response.  If (when) I disable ipv6 should I re-enable port forwarding?  If so, do you have a recommended configuration?

 

You should be able to get an open NAT without it, just using UPnP. If not then just use port forwarding otherwise DMZ.

 

You may find this guide useful: http://support.netduma.com/support/solutions/folders/16000090646

[KennyUbstrd1]

Appreciate your help!

[e38BimmerFN]

Be sure you set your xbox up for Automatic IP addresses and DNS. If you have uPnP enabled on the XR500 and don't use any Port Forward configurations there, DMZ is not needed, your xbox will get OPEN NAT across the board. Hold the power button on the console until it shuts off, then back on. This will help clear out any network caches. IPv6 is usable only if your ISP supports it natively.

[BIG__DOG]

i have ps4 and xbox1x and I use upnp with no issues. It works better for me than port forwarding. Avoid DMZ if you can as you are exposing your console putting it outside a firewall.

[RamGuy]

DMZ on these devices isn't the same as DMZ-zones on enterprise equipment. DMZ-zones on enterprise equipment refers to clients/servers exposed directly with their very own public IP-addresses with the traffic not behind filtered by the firewall. Its directly accessible on the public Internet.

DMZ on home routers like the XR450 and XR500 just means that your router will take every available port and forward it to this IP-address. Your console is not directly exposed as it still doesn't have a public IP-address directly attached and all the traffic is still having to go through NAT so the router is still doing the NAT translation from your public IP to the console's private IP-address, there is no bridging going on here otherwise no other devices behind the router would be able to have any kind of Internet traffic at the same time.

Using DMZ is never a recommended approach as its a lazy approach. It just tells your router to port forward all traffic that does not have any manual port forward rules to the specific IP-address. There is no need to use such a function unless for some reason the service you are trying to use does not support UPNP and you have no clue what ports needs to have inbound traffic to your console. Only then does it make sense to enable DMZ as it will ensure that traffic on all ports will have inbound NAT rules towards your console so all inbound traffic should work regardless of the fact that you don't know what ports will be used for the traffic.

The great thing about the XR450 and XR500 is the fact that they support Full Cone NAT which is the best for gaming as more secure forms of NAT like symmetric NAT and port restricted NAT will often cause issues with gaming when using UPNP as the ports that are being mapped by UPNP will not allow for inbound traffic from other external addresses other than the ones your console has already used for outbound traffic.

So lets say your Xbox One tells your router to have inbound traffic on port 3074 because it contacts IP 1.1.1.1 that needs to reply on 3074. This will work with both secure/strict NAT like symmetric NAT and port restricted NAT as your inbound traffic will come from 1.1.1.1 which is the same IP as your Xbox One X used to initiate UPNP. The problem with gaming is the fact that you in many scenarios will not only get inbound traffic from IP 1.1.1.1 because suddenly when playing multiplayer games you start getting party invites, voice chats and a lot of traffic from other players and these are done peer-to-peer so suddenly your friend with IP 2.2.2.2 tries to reach your Xbox One X through port 3074 but this traffic will be dropped as the more secure/strict nature of symmetric and port restricted NAT does not trust this IP.

When running Open NAT filtering, aka Full Cone NAT your router doesn't give a damn. Your console tells the router than I need inbound connections on port 3074 and the routers just say alrighty then and forwards all inbound traffic on port 3074 back to your Xbox One X regardless of its source IP-address which is preferable for gaming.

 

 

As I mentioned earlier we are in-luck here as Netgear is one of very few that actually allows you to choose between running more secure/strict NAT filtering or Open NAT filtering. You can select this under Setup -- WAN Setup -- NAT Filtering which is great and makes these the obvious choice as a gaming router. Most other routers won't let you choose and won't even tell you what kind of NAT filtering they provide to begin with you just have to test for yourself and be out of luck if you end up with strict NAT filtering.