Hosting on NETGEAR a No No!!!

[Lagerlout666]

Right this is abit crazy and i cant belive that netgear have done this.
I recently got a new Netgear router dg834g v3 free and was really made up as it had a hub built in and was supported by crappy aol.
I got it all set up and connected and was made up and i have been hosting on winmx for about 12 months and i started to have continual problems. people would just keep on dropping out the room all the time or would connect and then drop straight away again, This became a night mare and i tried everything thinking it was me, i hunted for network card updates i tried every slot on the router, i set up dmz port forward no firewall everything till i eventuallly decided it wasnt me being stupid.
I hunted high and low on the net but didnt seem to find much in the way of any documents or problems reported by peple using this prodoct, just mainly people being happy wid the new router, in the end i visited here:

http://kbserver.netgear.com/kb_web_files/N100725.asp

Now in plain english it say's

If you cannot use UPnP, the number of users simultaneously accessing the same Internet application will be limited:

Without UPnP, NETGEAR routers only support one person playing the same application at one time

So on reading this i realised that my wcs was manually portforwarded, an that all of the servers that ive seen that you can use none of them use upnp.
Now this has been 4-5 days of testing and fighting and only happens when my room becomes of a count of over 10. this means while using this router, and anyone else using netgear produts to host a room are stuffed, as redirecting a room to a netgear router will also not work.
Now if im wrong and their is a server out thier that uses upnp for connecting please let me know, as i have gone grey fighting with this and im sure that alot of people have tried hosting rooms and thought that they where just merly not stable enough to host. seems thats not right folks but its an integration into netgear that is casuing you all untold trouble's.

[Lagerlout666]

Right i choose not to give up on this router, as in all fairness i really like it and its really a good router apart from these issues.
Ive looked into making programs support upnp, mainly wcs. as this new router has pretty much crippled me when it comes to hosting.
But this is abit more than what i thought, i dont seem to be able to find much documation on upnp on google which is of anyhelp and its a shame,
but like i say im not going to give up on this and i think that it is a good idea, and if it could be made to support other server's then all the better for the new room host's. So anyway, ill keep you informed of how i get on with this and if anyone has any information on upnp that is of any use please could you post or get in touch wid me. im nornally in the help room, i would be very grateful.

[KM]

when a router forgets about a port forwarding for uploads etc, it causes a few uploads to disconnect - no big deal
when a router forgets about a port forwarding for a chat room, everyone drops - big deal

there is a reason you shouldn't use upnp for things that require stable port forwarding - not just the fact that it is unreliable, but even once you have forwarded a port with it, it can un-forward itself at any time, dropping everyone

[Lagerlout666]

yup i read up on that km but i found that was mainly by that ports transfer rate dropping to zero fora  period of time,
but anyway, ive got it to work, after alot of reading up and a direction from me here and quicks i gota  programme running and using a batch file to start the programme and wcs up at the same time, sems to be working for now, but as i say only JUST like 5 mins ago got it to work so ill hit on the testing front now, and my room is very rarely quiet so shouldnt be an issue of zero traffic. i may even look into if i can delay the hold up on the dropping of the port say making it do somethin else like ping or somethin but if this is as bad an issue then ill hit that hill later. Thanks km i know ya know more about this than me but i was determined not to come running to you for this one and if it works great wid wcs i can make this so that it works with all the other servers very easily, but like i say, here comes testing time, ill give you a shout bk in 24 hours or so and let you know how im getting on but at first glances im very hopefull that this will work.

[Lagerlout666]

GANGSTER Test Room Tiny online lol_7BBC9FAC1872

The test room for those that a curious and wana say ha ha km told you it wouldnt work

[KM]

upnp can work just fine, however with many routers they simply forget port forwardings for no apparent reason (that's why any program using it has to keep polling the router periodically and re-forwarding as required)

my router for example would be perfectly fine hosting using upnp as it forwards just fine with upnp (even allowing me to forward port 0... which has the result of breaking every port forwarding in the thing, lol), but i have seen many that do not and for those using upnp for chat hosting would cause them problems and they would need manual forwarding

upnp often overrides manual forwarding and is separate to it, so it couldn't even be put there to just work when manual forwarding isn't done, if added it would probably need to be disabled by default... which sort of makes it useless

[yoda]

I thaught UPNP wasn't stable and static port forwarding was....
I've ran webservers, teamspeak servers game server ect without any problems.... but then again my router is a netgear dg814... an older model....

[Bearded Blunder]

i also host & even run a user cache through an older netgear.. also apparently without problems..

[Levi]

Greetings

After running a chat room on winmx for around 3 years, I recently switched isp's and got given a netgear router. along with a 16mb connection.  How wonderful, going from a 2mb to a 16mb connection, or so i thought.

I am connected at 15.3mb which is pretty good, I can get my room up and running using FXServe, the only problem I am having is I cannot access my own room using winmx which I have been able to do from all my networked machines with my old ISP.

I have gone through the port forwarding, everything I can think of I have tried, and I still cannot get into my own room, I have downloaded other chat clients & tried with them, still no joy.  Has anybody come up with a solution for the Netgear problem or am I going to have to tell my ISP what they can do with their router???

Give Thanks

[nylly444]

That's not really a Netgear problem.
Many Routers won't allow you to use the room address for the outside world, you need to use the internal address via loopback instead.
This tutorial shows you how to do that

[splashdown]

Hi, on the question of routers dropping upnp forwarding - this is, i believe what is supposed to happen. If it didn't, a client that died would cause the port to be forever blocked.

The applications effectively takes out a lease on a port for a given length of time, often an hour. It is up to the application to refresh that lease or lose the port. In this respect, it's a bit like the way DHCP works.

I have used a netgear dg834V2 (not v3) without any problems at all on port forwarding. 

[KM]

you are half correct, upnp provides the options of either a temporary forwarding set to expire after a while or a permanent one that does not expire (but is cleared on a reboot of the router)

but some routers don't give the option of temporary forwardings (they just ignore the timeout parameter), and others accept a permanent forwarding, but still drop it anyway, or the worst ones (think a few linksys ones do this) always add it as a permanent forwarding (survives a reboot) and ignore the timeout, as well as having a limit to the number of forwardings, which does make some programs which use a random port basically fill the thing up after a few unclean shutdowns

a router ignoring a request for a temporary forwarding by ignoring the timeout parameter is allowed although not good, however it should never just remove a port forwarding unless either the forwarding request specified a timeout or it is explicitly removed by the application, it should never just be removed for no reason, however some companies seem to think it's a good idea to do that anyway, which is neither desirable behaviour or practical (if there is an issue to having too many forwardings then when it gets full remove the oldest, or better still the one that has been idle for the longest)

my router supports the timeout parameter however i deliberately did not use it in the patch because it is only really useful for dynamic ports, something like winmx if it did shutdown uncleanly and leave the forwarding in place it wouldn't be a problem because the next time it started up it would go and use the same port again - but it would be useful if that stupid messenger rubbish from microsoft would use timeouts, it uses dynamic ports and no timeout, and as a result every time my sisters computer crashes she leaves a port forwarding sitting in the router cluttering it up and making the list look ugly (although i've not hit any limit yet, i reboot it when there are too many because it's a pain to try and find my own forwardings on the list)

[Lagerlout666]

mine is the dg834g v3 their is a massive diffrence between all the models. i have looked in to this an alot of people are having this problem when you look into it properly. their are a few groups working on making their own firmware for the dg834g v3 as it is a linux software router. which is suppose to be great little box for linux peeps as linux router's are suppose to be very expensive but i would not know. It seems to be only a problem with the netgear firmware though as the board in it is a AR7 which is also in some of the new WRT routers. I few people have been trying to clone the linksys routers firmware to run on the netgear routers but at most it ends up breaking them. The board itself has 16mb of ram on it but when the router is running it only had 1.5mb free so apparently it is hard to add any modifycations to it as the ram fills up and it crashs. Their has been better luck on modifying the WRT routers as they have chossen not to fill it full of language files etc like netgear have with their models so their is more room for experimenting. I have hope that these teams will prevail and soon enough their will be a open source firmware for the netgear routers as also the WRT models. Or i wont hold my breath Netgear will listen to the pi***d off peeps like me that have a pretty crappy router and remove this stupid only allowing multiple connections via upnp

[Happy Dude]

Don't go NETCOMM either. Can't get into my own rooms i host unless i host using mx or mxcontrol.            ANY loopback method will just crash the hosting prog.

[dread]

I never had a problem with netgear routers hosting winmx, roSe, fxserv rooms. I run robomx in linux under WINE using the same router with no problems.

One of the replies mentioned setting loopback address, that was the only difference I ever found when hosting. I had to set the room (in roboserve) to use 127.0.0.1 (i.e. localhost) but it still appeared correctly to "outside". So long as you have set port forwarding correctly it should be fine, note that most routers automatically allow all outgoing connections anyway so you just set port forwarding for incoming stuff, local IP (192.168.0.2 usually) and port numbers/protocol

dread

[dread]

P.S. if you find room crashing on loopback that is nothing to do with the router, because it does not even go via the router on loopback.

[Lagerlout666]

Well as a little update to this thread. I dont kow how many people have the netgear dg834g v3. And im not sure if you have this same netgear router dread, as i have reports from older versions that they work great also.

But netgear have just released a new firmware for this router and i can say it is a hell of alot better. They havent addresed alot of the flaws but the interoprabilty between adsl(gmt) Adsl2 haspretty much been resolved. I have tested a versio i have modifed myself to allow a few diffrent settings and it works great up to now but still in testing, the challenge will be to host the room and see how it goes. If my version allows me to finally host im going to send it to netgear and shuv it where the sun dont shine.