New Issue with Port Forwarding Westell: 7500

[mehoo462]

This is different than what's been posted before. I've been at this all night and I'm fed up. Any advice would be useful.

Router: Westell 7500 (notorious for BS I think)

Problem: I'm not connecting to any of the Multiwinia servers. At the main menu the "authentication status" remains unknown. When i go to multiplayer it spends forever "requesting server list."

What I've done: I've forwarded ports 4000 and 40001 to my IP. I'm pretty sure they are forwarded correctly. I have other applications, specifcally uTorrent which require port forwarding and that is working fine. uTorrent has a "check if port is forwarded correctly" feature. So I tested both 4000 and 4001. Both of them tested successfully. Now I know uTorrent uses TCP and Multiwinia wants UDP. My router gives options for TCP, UDP, and Both. I've tryied forwarding the ports using all three settings and gotten the same results (that is, none). Except the uTorrent test was unsuccessful with UDP only.

I'm aware that the Westell 7500 has an issue where you have to set up an entry for an outgoing port for each incoming port you create. I've done all that, and like I said... i was able to set up port 59071 for uTorrent successfully.


Furthermore, I know it's the firewall because when I set firewall protection to low or off, Multiwinia works fine. I tried setting up DMZ, and it was disastrous (caused the router powercycle and i couldn't connect to the internet). I have played Multiwinia successfully on this computer over a different network.


Any thoughts? I'm at the end of my line. Verizon sent me this piece of garbage for free. But I'de still rather use it than run out and spend $40 on a new router. Although it's looking like that's the case. I don't know enough about how port forwarding works to identify if this is something my cheapass router is bugging out on or if it's a problem with Multiwinia.

[bert_the_turtle]

Have you tried not forwarding ports at all? Outgoing connections should work fine (communication with the metaserver for authentication and the server list, for example, as well as connecting to games hosted by other people), they just rely on functional NAT.

[mehoo462]

yah, if i Don't forward anything I still can't even authenticate. That is unless i turn the firewall settings to off or low.

I found this article, which may have something to do with the problem. [url]http://news.cnet.com/8301-13554_3-10013862-33.html[/url]

By checking the security logs, i noticed that when Multiwinia was running the router was also blocking a lot of outbound traffic on port 5009. IV hasn't mentioned that port but I thought I'de try it anyway. I opened that ports, but amazingly the router kept on blocking the traffic. Seems very suspicious, and suggests that might have something to do with my problem.

I set the security settings to low, which as you can see from the article, means it's blocking SOMETHING but god knows what. Multiwinia works beautifully with no port forwarding enabled. I checked the security logs, it's blocking plenty of outbound traffic on port 4000, but nothing on port 5009.

Seems peculiar. So anyway, i think i'm just going to play with Low Settings. Because I don't want to take the time to figure out why 5009 is blocked even though I've specifically opened it. Hopefully I won't get nuked or something.... maybe i'll just invest in a router that doesn't nonsensically block outgoing traffic and not let you do anything about it.

[bert_the_turtle]

5009 is the source port of the communication with the metaserver. So yeah, if that's blocked, no network game is possible. I don't think you need to worry about security with the lowered settings; all unwanted incoming traffic should still be blocked, and botnet clients typically use standard protocols to communicate with their master, so no router settings that allow you to actually use the net for something useful will stop them anyway.