The Port Forwarding thread: Minimizing multiplayer connection issues

[Groman]

Edit: NM

I saw your previous message as I was subscribed to this thread.
Were you able to try the scenario you described?
I think it should still work as long as your router can manage multiple UPnP requests or you manually configure two different port forwarding rules.

Will probably try it myself at some point as I only tried private group for LAN session e.g. no other CMDRs connected to my LAN clients.

 

[Vaulstone]

Wow, I'm going to have to wade through 17 pages of arguments just to implement this and I probably do need to implement this because not only am I playing but my wife and kid as well (we formed a Group) and its very often my kid gets dropped back to either the station or a planet we take off from when she boards my wife's ship to take the role of Gunner. Now that we got her trained up and she's flying her own ship, now when we form a Team, my wife cannot hear or be heard by our daughter on the in-game voice channel. It may get bad enough we may forgo the voice channel in favor of Discord, but we prefer the immersion of the in-game comms system.

Lately, there has been a lot of crashing to either the Menu screen or all the way to desktop, though I think the latter is a matter of tweaking the videocard settings.

Also, I noticed this was posted in 2021 and the Firewall portion might need to be upgraded now that Frontier has included a brand new launcher for Odyssey.

 

[Groman]

Wow, I'm going to have to wade through 17 pages of arguments just to implement this and I probably do need to implement this because not only am I playing but my wife and kid as well (we formed a Group) and its very often my kid gets dropped back to either the station or a planet we take off from when she boards my wife's ship to take the role of Gunner. Now that we got her trained up and she's flying her own ship, now when we form a Team, my wife cannot hear or be heard by our daughter on the in-game voice channel. It may get bad enough we may forgo the voice channel in favor of Discord, but we prefer the immersion of the in-game comms system.

Lately, there has been a lot of crashing to either the Menu screen or all the way to desktop, though I think the latter is a matter of tweaking the videocard settings.

Also, I noticed this was posted in 2021 and the Firewall portion might need to be upgraded now that Frontier has included a brand new launcher for Odyssey.

We can try to help. Firstly I would say check your local computer firewalls if you play over LAN.
Just switching the network in Windows from public to private helped with LAN telepresence in my case.
Is UPnP on in your network settings in Elite? If yes, then that should save you the trouble of manual configuration.

Also, the game has been unstable in the last few weeks.
I am in a large squadron and many of us experienced mauve Adders and orange Sidewinders error codes.

We can also look at the logs and see if there are any hints there.

 

[AceMcKool]

Wow, I'm going to have to wade through 17 pages of arguments just to implement this and I probably do need to implement this [...]

After almost two years of frustrating trial and error and A WHOLE LOT OF READING, I finally accomplished this just this past Saturday in these 7 "simple" steps.

(click on pics to blow out)

1) Launched the game to main menu, went to Options > Network, and changed these two settings, hit Apply, then exited to Desktop:

2) Went into my router's Local Network settings and changed this From ISP to Static:

3) Installed the Port Forward Network Utilities app (PFNU). Scroll all the way down and choose Free Trial:

4) Launched PFNU's Static IP Address Tool and clicked "Make it Static" (shown here after the fact. It originally said "This IP address is currently dynamic. Make it static").

Yes, I trusted the app blindly and let it do its magic. I didn't copy, write down, or back up any of the original settings. However, I do strongly advise you do so. "Do as everyone says, don't do as I do", blah, blah, blah.

5) Checked my Network > Ethernet settings in Windows and verified that IP assignment was changed from Automatic to Manual, and that everything else matched the PFNU's new settings, then wrote down my new IPv4 address.

6) Went into my router's Port Mapping settings and set up the ED 5100 port like this, entering my new IPv4 address in the appropriate field. After saving changes, I rebooted my router:

7) Launched PFNU's Port Checker app, entered the port number, ticked "UDP", hit "Check Me" and voilá, my port was open.

That was it. I've played for hours since Saturday, not a single connection issue, and no problem seeing/instancing with other players in private groups. I haven't tried in Open but I have no reason to think it would be any different. Also, load screens while on-foot (disembarking/boarding from/to ship/SRV) now are A LOT SHORTER than before. Same with menus at stations and loading of system maps; no more loading icons spinning for ages. Not sure if it's got anything to do with port forwarding but I don't think it's a coincidence.

Anyway, this is what worked for me. Hope it works for you. Good luck! o7

 

[Wisho]

Thanks for the details !

In a word : either your router's uPNP service or your ISP's DNS is f*ed up. It would be interesting to find out which by turning step 2) back to "From_ISP" and see if the problem returns or not.

I have the same kind of problem with my ISP box which serves as a DHCP, the associated LAN DNS is not reliable as ~half the requests about local hosts return the correct address but the other half return "Non-existent". That causes an unbelieveable mess in every service that repeats requests instead of caching... I don't have the slightest hope that my ISP will correct this anyway, the day I'm fed up with 'hosts' files I'll get a real router.

 

[KDK_warhead]

SetupPortForwardNetworkUtilities.exe

According to virustotal 2025-01-07:
Virustotal
DeepInstinct
MALICIOUS
QuickHeal
Trojan.Ghanarava.1632127757d5b3b9

File size 3301KB
MD5: F173C344B00B26AC42756404DFD5B3B9
SHA-1: 21C5EBC09E378B6D7EDA6F4FDE5685C3813875B5

Malewarebyte and Microsoft Defender doesn’t find anything bad.
I guess this is a false positive?

 

[Groman]

SetupPortForwardNetworkUtilities.exe

According to virustotal 2025-01-07:
Virustotal
DeepInstinct
MALICIOUS
QuickHeal
Trojan.Ghanarava.1632127757d5b3b9

File size 3301KB
MD5: F173C344B00B26AC42756404DFD5B3B9
SHA-1: 21C5EBC09E378B6D7EDA6F4FDE5685C3813875B5

Malewarebyte and Microsoft Defender doesn’t find anything bad.
I guess this is a false positive?

I had a lot of false positive with installer because they install something in your system which is what a lot of malware do.
If you scan the actual program exe after the install, you might get a different result.
It is still a program that will open a port and receive data which could also be interpreted as malicious.

There is also a chance that someone messes with the installer to distribute malware. There is always a risk when you add programs to your computer.

 

[Groman]

Anyway, this is what worked for me. Hope it works for you. Good luck! o7

Thanks for sharing CMDR!

Any chance you could share your network stats (main menu, settings, networking) after a decently long and eventful session?

I'm usually getting slightly less than 1/2 ratio for most connection type (except server) and I am curious if it is just me or the average CMDR.

 

[AceMcKool]

Thanks for sharing CMDR!

Any chance you could share your network stats (main menu, settings, networking) after a decently long and eventful session?

I'm usually getting slightly less than 1/2 ratio for most connection type (except server) and I am curious if it is just me or the average CMDR.

Will do, but my decently long sessions (4-6 hours) are on weekends, starting Thursday evenings.

 

[KDK_warhead]

I had a lot of false positive with installer because they install something in your system which is what a lot of malware do.
If you scan the actual program exe after the install, you might get a different result.
It is still a program that will open a port and receive data which could also be interpreted as malicious.

There is also a chance that someone messes with the installer to distribute malware. There is always a risk when you add programs to your computer.

OK. I installed it and it seems ok. Port test worked fine.
Thanks!

 

[Groman]

OK. I installed it and it seems ok. Port test worked fine.
Thanks!

You can also remove it after you're done testing if you think your setup is stable.

In my case, I have a finicky router so I keep testing if i make any change.

I'm still looking for a good UDP stream monitor tool if someone has any.
The Windows Resource Monitor lacks details and the Sysinternal TCPView has a similar issue.

I'm looking for something that counts packets or bytes/bits along with source/destination port, protocol and IP.

 

[Wisho]

I'm still looking for a good UDP stream monitor tool if someone has any.

Can you please be more specific about what exactly you wish to monitor ?

UDP's "problem" (*) is that packets are sent to their grim fate, there is no tracking or reception acknowledgement of any kind.
The sender can monitor what it sent, but will not be aware of what happens to it.
The receiver can monitor what it received, but will never be aware of the existence of whatever was lost before reception.

(*) more of a feature in fact because it's designed on that purpose : the application data feed lives and must be exploitable with whatever is received, deal in some way with misordered or corrupted or unexpected packets and ignore those that would be lost without expecting them later. Like, in a phone conversation, if a chunk doesn't arrive on time, just forget it and go ahead, don't cut/delay the conversation for that, and if it ever arrives later, well too bad, drop it.
On the contrary, the TCP driver will ensure packets are all here, in their original order and untampered before presenting the data to the application - and if needed, will wait or ask the sender for resends, and if something's wrong for too long, will declare the connection broken. Like a file transfer can't suffer a single byte being inaccurate, or it's just bad as a whole.

 

[Groman]

Can you please be more specific about what exactly you wish to monitor ?

Sorry, I'm not sure how much more specific I can be.

"something that counts packets or bytes/bits along with source/destination port, protocol and IP."

I looked again and I found a tool that does what I need: LiveTcpUdpWatch
I guess sometimes, you need to try several times before you find what you need

 

[Wisho]

"something that counts packets or bytes/bits along with source/destination port, protocol and IP."

That's good and yes you'll easily find tools doing this.

I was asking and elaborating because I once had to schedule and prepare a 1 hour meeting to a bunch of managers to answer their question "why the hell can't we know exactly what's wrong with this provider's data stream and shut them down on insisting the problem is on our side". Well, guys, it's f*ing UDP...

 

[Groman]

That's good and yes you'll easily find tools doing this.

I was asking and elaborating because I once had to schedule and prepare a 1 hour meeting to a bunch of managers to answer their question "why the hell can't we know exactly what's wrong with this provider's data stream and shut them down on insisting the problem is on our side". Well, guys, it's f*ing UDP...

You know, I was surprised the ones I named before didn't have great features for UDP, this one is really great for my needs.
I was able to see even the UPnP request the game is making and the response of my router and curiously some king of smart light bulb controller :-D
Another nice feature, if you close the game, it still keeps the total data until you refresh or close the program.

I hear you for explaining to non-technical people. Fortunately for us, I'm an ex network admin

 

[Atlantharo]

Wow, and I thought the problems with network configurations for games were a thing of the past since the abolition of BNC networks and modern UPnP protocols. I think IPv6 has ripped open a wormhole into the past ;-)