PS3 Online Connection
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Hey everyone. I'm just getting settled in with pfsense and have found that I have a problem with playing online multiplayer games on my PS3. Seems to be a connection issue, but doesn't make sense to me since I have tried solving it in many different ways. I have a firewall rule to force my Consoles (PS3 & Xbox 360) out the WAN only. This works. I don't pay for Xbox Live so everything I have set is working fine 100% for it. UPnP is turned on on both my PS3 and pfsense, although I never see any ports on the UPnP status list.
Without any other setting for the PS3 (no port forwarding, just forcing it out the WAN) I can connect online to my friendslist, check to ensure it's only going out the WAN via the web browser, and download demos and whatnot. Then I go to play GTA4 online and it takes an unusually long amount of time to find a lobby. When it finally does, 9 times out of 10 I'm either in it by myself, or there's only one other person. Often if I sit there long enough other users will enter the lobby and I can play - but other times it will disconnect saying I lost a connection to a player. Connecting wirelessly to my neighbor's internet and playing GTA4 online proves that it is my fault with pfsense's settings, as I have no difficulties playing with large amounts of people on that connection.
I've tried this topic: http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,7295.0.html , for setting up Advanced Outbound NAT, but it didn't help because I think my setup may be a little different - it resulted in seemingly killing my load balancing and general internet connection (unless I was doing something wrong).
Next I tried manually forwarding ports I saw the PS3 as well as GTA4 needed to connect (6672, 8001, 28900, 27900, 5223, 3478:3480, 80, 8080, 443) - thanks to a google search. Forwarding PS3Ports in the WAN rule had the same result as when I wasn't using port forwarding, which I found odd since the UPnP ports status list is blank, and I found it odd because I had to manually forward my bittorrent ports despite uTorrent's ability to use UPnP.
That's basically where I gave up (besides tinkering around changing little things trying to get the right combination) and knew I had to post here.
If you can, please review the pictures below of my setup, firewall rules, etc, and help me figure out what I'm doing wrong. As I said before, I'm a pfsense noob so sorry if this is something immensely simple that I'm missing. Thanks in advance, and please let me know if you need any other information. :)
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Since you tried to help me (even though that link was pretty much useless), I'll try and help you. If the UPnP support for PS3 is anything like the XBOX 360, I believe it requires you to use DHCP for it to work properly. I noticed that you are assigning IPs manually and doing a lot of port forwarding including IM and bittorent ports. This shouldn't be necessary either as UPnP should detect this automatically if the program supports it. In my case it shows XBOX, Miranda and uTorrent under the UPnP status. Just remember in the case of IM and bittorent, you'll have to look for the settings to enable UPnP.
In the case of the XBOX 360, if you manually assign a private IP address, it will not say "Open" for the NAT setting when you test XBOX Live.
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If the UPnP support for PS3 is anything like the XBOX 360, I believe it requires you to use DHCP for it to work properly. I noticed that you are assigning IPs manually and doing a lot of port forwarding including IM and bittorent ports. This shouldn't be necessary either as UPnP should detect this automatically if the program supports it. In my case it shows XBOX, Miranda and uTorrent under the UPnP status. Just remember in the case of IM and bittorent, you'll have to look for the settings to enable UPnP.
Interesting, I didn't know UPnP required DHCP. Possibly that is the problem with a lot of the issues I'm having. I have UPnP turned on on my PS3, uTorrent, etc but as I said before my UPnP status list is always empty. I'll try putting my PS3 on DHCP.
EDIT: Gave the PS3 a dynamic address and it didn't help. In fact, it made my NAT type 3 (which is bad).
In the case of the XBOX 360, if you manually assign a private IP address, it will not say "Open" for the NAT setting when you test XBOX Live.
Just for the record, I have my Xbox 360 set on a manual private IP address (as seen in my network map) and the network test does in fact say the NAT setting is "Open". I also just checked while it was on, and it had 2 ports forwarded for it in the UPnP status page. So it seems as though UPnP does not require DHCP. I don't pay for Live, so I don't have any issues with the 360 anyway.
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Interesting, I didn't know UPnP required DHCP. Possibly that is the problem with a lot of the issues I'm having. I have UPnP turned on on my PS3, uTorrent, etc but as I said before my UPnP status list is always empty. I'll try putting my PS3 on DHCP.
EDIT: Gave the PS3 a dynamic address and it didn't help. In fact, it made my NAT type 3 (which is bad).
I didn't say UPnP required it but I believe I read that the patch for XBOX 360 compatibility needed DHCP to work properly. Maybe it works for you because you're forwarding ports which defeats the purpose of the UPnP.
Does the UPnP status show anything in there? If it doesn't have anything in there, my guess is that it isn't using UPnP.
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Are we talking about the 360 or PS3 now? Here's the latest for both -
360:
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The UPnP status page shows a single port forwarded when the 360 is on. (Apparently Live only uses/needs one port.)
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I'm not manually forwarding anything for the 360 - just giving it a static IP and pointing it out the WAN.
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As for the patch your talking about - do you mean pfSense has a 360 patch included in it? That's interesting that it would even need one, but may show that the PS3 needs one as well.
PS3:
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The UPnP status page shows a single port forwarded when the PS3 is on. (PS3 Online uses/needs many ports however…they vary from game to game.)
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I have the PS3 set to use UPnP, and obviously it kindof is - but something is definitely wrong.
I guess I need to look into putting the PS3 on a DMZ.
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Hmm, very odd that you are having problems.
I've all my equipment on DHCP, and have created static DHCP entries for them.
Of course DNS is pointing to the firewall, as well as Default Gateway.Then I've enabled UPnP on the Firewall, X-box360 and PS3.
The firewall has UPnP forbidden for everything, except the X-Box360 and PS3's IP addresses.This works without any sort of problems. They get the best NAT possible both, I see ports open and close according to the different games and states the machines are in.
Here at work I've tried as well, and here I see problems, but my guess is that it has something to do with some of the ancient switches we have here :-(