Port Forwarding Issues on RT-AC66U B1

[Tevibear]

Has anyone else been having issues getting the port forwarding to work on this router with the latest Merlin AC68U firmware loaded on it? I can't, for the life of me, get it to open any ports. UPnP works fine, but port forwarding doesn't seem to work. I am using portchecktool.com to test the ports. I have tried several on my wired computer as well as the X-Box360, and both cannot get ports to open up. Are there any specific volly of settings that must be set just right in other menus and options to get it to forward the ports? Thanks in advance.

Update: I was able to temporarily get around the issue of only opening up the X-Box360 by limiting the External and Internal port ranges for UPnP to 3074 in all 4 boxes. Hopefully the router actually does the job of only using this port in UPnP and not just displaying the settings as visual eye candy. I really don't want to roll back to the ASUS firmware, as someone suggested that the problem could be with the Merlin Firmware.

 

[bbunge]

No issues with port 80 and 10000 TCP forwarded on my AC66U B1. Running Merlin 380.64. Now, with that said, I did do a factory reset after the upgrade from 380.63_2 and manually configured all the settings. Even though we are told an upgrade from a prior version does not need a reset I do one to avoid issues. Also have added a swap file on a USB stick as sometimes using download master and writing to the USB drive can push the memory usage. Also running 6RD for IPV6.

 

[RMerlin]

Port testing tools won't work unless you have a service actively listening to that port. I.e. if you forward a port for a certain game and the game isn't running, then a port test will fail.

Forwarding a port merely tells the router to let the traffic in into the specified IP. If that IP doesn't actively respond to traffic on that port, then the test will still fail. That doesn't mean that the port isn't correctly forwarded.

 

[Tevibear]

Port testing tools won't work unless you have a service actively listening to that port. I.e. if you forward a port for a certain game and the game isn't running, then a port test will fail.

Forwarding a port merely tells the router to let the traffic in into the specified IP. If that IP doesn't actively respond to traffic on that port, then the test will still fail. That doesn't mean that the port isn't correctly forwarded.

Thanks. I was connecting to the network with my Xbox360, and it said my NAT was restricted, so I enabled UPnP, and the NAT was open. I had already tried multiple things like disabling the Firewall in the router, and nothing would open up my NAT so that the Xbox was happy. I will try as bbunge has suggested also with setting the router back to factory defaults and then rebooting and then setting everything up again from scratch to see if that solves it.

 

[RacerRon]

I ran into a similar problem with port forwarding on my ac88u. This problem has been consistent across several different firmware versions. I set a port to forward to my Nas for Plex Media server to have internet remote access. Initially Plex will connect but eventually, the connection drops and I have to restart the link in Plex. Ultimately, I removed the port forwarding entry and just let upnp make the connection. So far, there are no disconnects.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

 

[Tevibear]

I ran into a similar problem with port forwarding on my ac88u. This problem has been consistent across several different firmware versions. I set a port to forward to my Nas for Plex Media server to have internet remote access. Initially Plex will connect but eventually, the connection drops and I have to restart the link in Plex. Ultimately, I removed the port forwarding entry and just let upnp make the connection. So far, there are no disconnects.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

Seems to be the case with this router too then. I have tried everything to get port forwarding to work. I don't have IPV6 enabled, as my ISP has informed us that it is not ready yet. As stated earlier, I did something similar to what you did, but I was able to use the function of limiting the range of internal and external ports for UPnP to a single port (3074) for the xbox. When I check the port forward page in System Logs, it only shows the this single port open and the static IP address that it's supposed to go to. I'm not sure why UPnP always seems to work so well, yet Port forwarding is broken on many routers. One would think that the powers that be would tap into the architecture that UPnP is using to open up the ports and carry some of that code over to the port forwarding side of the house. There has to be a way to make it work correctly. My old D-Link router had the same problem with port forwarding, but I was able to get it to work by disabling SPI (Stateful Packet Inspection) in the firewall. Disabling the entire firewall on this router does nothing. I even restored the router to factory defaults and set the whole thing up again, and still no port forwarding.

 

[RacerRon]

Just thinking out loud here and have not tried yet but, I wonder if the port you want to forward needs to be removed from the UPNP port range. Maybe the router ignores the forward because the port is already reserved for UPNP....I will play later when I have some time.


Sent from my Pixel using Tapatalk

 

[Tevibear]

Just thinking out loud here and have not tried yet but, I wonder if the port you want to forward needs to be removed from the UPNP port range. Maybe the router ignores the forward because the port is already reserved for UPNP....I will play later when I have some time.


Sent from my Pixel using Tapatalk

I think there might be a slight misunderstanding here. I couldn't get it to work, and still can't to this day, using the conventional methods. I was able to open up the port for the X-box360 using the UPnP option and putting 3074 in all 4 fields of the port ranges instead. That way, UPnP only opens up that single port and does not expose the entire network. Hope that clarifies it for ya. I have pretty much given up on trying to get the port forwarding to work the way it's supposed to, especially since the only reason I needed it was to open up the NAT for the X-box. Now that I have that solved, albeit using an unconventional workaround, I don't need to stress myself out anymore trying to fix port forwarding on this router. I thought about DMZ, but figured that would not work any better than the port forwarding. Also, I don't want every packet coming into the network to go through the X-box either. Thanks for your input though. I appreciate that.

 

[LBizzle]

so question -
will this router support multiple Xbox Ones? without having to port forward or trigger?
Its my understanding that the UPNP function should allow the two to talk to each other - and both have NATS open -

im having an issue with my ISP furnished equipment and so im looking at getting my own.
Its really frustrating to not be able to play with my wife.