[SOLVED] Port Forwading & DMZ - cannot bypass firewall - trying to connect Nephew's game consoles

[just1byrd]

Hello,
Please help if you can. My nephew has waited 3 weeks for me to come in and look at the network to play his new PS4 he got for Xmas. This is my first time port forwarding. I appreciate any advice or input.

PROBLEM
I cannot bypass the firewall by forwarding ports or using DMZ.
My nephew will be staying with my parents for a while and their modem/router's firewall is blocking his Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4 from online gaming. They are connected and to the internet as I have verified that he can stream movies and YouTube on the consoles. I am positive it is the routers firewall because I have turned it off and both consoles work fine. However, when I try to port forward or put either one in the DMZ something still blocks them from being able to play online games. My first thought was I am not getting all the ports right, but what then would be blocking them when in the DMZ? I am rather missing an option, or the router is acting up.


CURRENT ROUTER SETTINGS.
Modem/Router is an Arris SBG6782-AC.

-Nintendo Switch is connecting via wifi.
-PlayStation4 is connecting via Ethernet cable directly to gateway. (for testing purposes. it will be Wi-Fi as well until I can get a cable ran to back bedroom.)
-I have set their router up so that static IPs and the DMZ are outside the DHCP instead of inside the DHCP with reserved IPs. So I set the static IP by entering it on the device when connecting it to the network as opposed to having to reserve all the IPs by MAC addresses.
Below is how I organized the local IPs.
The DHCP range is 192.168.0.2 - 192.168.0.199
The DMZ is 192.168.0.200
PlayStation4 is 192.168.0.228
Nintendo Switch is 192.168.0.229
Ports I am trying to open for the PlayStation4
Ports I am trying to open for the Switch

Some general info from router's ABOUT

Below is the router's firewall selection page...

In order to find my error faster and with less confusion. I am just going to leave the PS4 out of the equation until I get the Switch working by either port forwarding or by placing it in the DMZ..
Below is the port forwarding entry I made for the switch and then a picture of the Switch's Internet Settings that I manually entered to verify that I am connected with the correct IP address. As stated above, I got the port settings here.

I then unplugged the router for a hard reset and turned the Switch off for a minute. When I turned it all back on, it did not work.

So I tried putting the Switch into the DMZ. I did another hard reset after making the changes.
Below is the DMZ page from the router and a picture of the change IP address on the Switch to verify that I have the correct IP addresses.

Still the Switch does not work.



I then tried to put the DMZ inside the DHCP range to see if this would help. I changed the address range in the router to incorporate the DMZ. Then I entered an IP address reservation for the DMZ. Then I changed the connection on the Switch from manually configuring its own IP to letting the router do it. As below...

Still it does not work.

Then to confirm and verify that turning off the firewall fixes everything, I turned it off one more time...

The Switch now works. I can do everything above with the PlayStation4 and get the same results.

Please any advice or knowledge would be very appreciated.

 

[anotherdrew]

First off, my son has a switch and a PS4 and I do no port forwarding. They work just fine. Yes, there are some game communications features that he can't use, but since I don't want him bathed in curse words, I'm ok with that.

Some basics about port forwarding and DMZs. The reason we need these features is something called NAT (Network Address Translation). NAT allows multiple devices the use of a single IPv4 address. This is good because without NAT we would have run out of IPv4 addresses a while ago. One of the feature/limitations of NAT is that it is easy for devices behind the NAT to start a connection, it is impossible for a device outside the NAT to start a connection. The router would not know which device to send the data to. So, we came up with port forwarding. Now, if a router gets a request for connection on port 555, it knows to send that to device XYZ.

Reasons why I think yours didn't work. First, you forwarded all the ports to the switch. I know that is what Nintendo's instructions are, but that is nuts. Ports have to be used for other things, the switch can't have them all. I would try adjusting that to UDP ports 45000-65535 to 192.168.0.229 (of the switch's current IP address). For the PS4, it is TCP: 80, 443, 3478, 3479, 3480 and UDP: 3478, 3479 to 192.168.0.228 (of the current IP address).

Turn off the DMZ.

Make sure the IP addresses for the switch and PS4 are reserved in the router otherwise they might get a new IP address each time you turn them on.

Just because the switch and PS4 have reserved addresses does not mean they are currently using those addresses. After doing the reservation (or any other IP address change) restart the devices.

Let us know if any of that helps.