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It’s done. My Xbox 360 is now working properly via NAT talking through the Trashwall and using WOW! service.
After getting my previously mentioned pf problem on Trashwall sorted out I tested out the Xbox 360 to see if the network test for Xbox Live would pass. Guess what? It didn’t, continuing to insist that my NAT type is strict.
A bit more research (and information which seems to come from this post at Russ’s Blog) indicates that the Xbox Live uses the following classifications for NAT:
Strict: Symmetric NAT.
Moderate: Cone shaped NAT with port filtering or with UPnP turned off.
Open: Cone shaped NAT with no port filtering or with UPnP turned on.
Cone and symmetric NAT descriptions are formalized in RFC3489, and a bit more digging brought up this general how-to for using OpenBSD’s pf, indicating that the static-port directive on a NAT rule (described here in the POOL OPTIONS section of the pf.conf(5) man page) makes OpenBSD do cone-shaped NAT.
So, overall, what did it take to fix it? Well, it was actually three things:
· I switched to Wide Open West for data service, which gave me three IPs.
· While the whole house was NATted through one of the IPs, the Xbox 360 alone has been bidirectionally NATted through another.
·The magic static-port option on the NAT line for the Xbox 360.
Without a second IP I wouldn’t have been able to forward all ports inbound, which without a UPnP daemon (which didn’t go well before) would have resulted only a NAT setting of Moderate.
All of this has been documented in the updated version of the article on the Trashwall, my home’s a firewall / NAT device / switch / whatever built out of an unwanted PowerMac G4.
(In case you didn’t notice, this photo does a good job illustrating the wire in a aperture grill, such as the one here on an Sony KD-34XBR970 CRT HDTV. If you’d like to see the original without the no sign, here’s the small version and here it is at full res.)
