Airport Extreme and UPnP, Xbox, Vizio TV, and other issues

rceee said:

This Christmas I decided to get the new Airport Extreme router. I have a perfectly fine working D-Link router, but I liked the USB capability of the AE and its tighter integration with my Apple products (iPhone 4, iPad 2, Macbook Pro, and Apple TV).

I got home and set it up, and everything was working great. All the Apple devices were hopping along and even seemed a bit faster.

The problem came when I attempted, the next day, to utilize my Xbox 360, and my top-of-the-line Vizio 3D HDTV.

The Xbox responded with an error, after connecting to the Airport Extreme, saying that I needed to enable UPnP. The Vizio TV connected wirelessly via WPA (or probably WPA2), but then various apps would not work, such as the Amazon Video streaming app, Netflix, Hulu, etc.

After some research, it appears that surprisingly, the Airport Extreme does not support UPnP, which as I understand it, handles the closing/opening/forwarding of ports related to various devices and their softwares/apps. Some posts talk at length about setting the Xbox360 to be in the AE's DMZ, or to set up port forwarding, but seemed somewhat generally inconclusive. I could find no similar documentation/advice regarding the Vizio HDTV and its respective video streaming apps.

It's been a long time since I've even had to *think* about setting up port forwarding on a router, and I'm guessing that even if it could be figured out on the Xbox360, finding out all of the ports and such utilized in the Vizio HDTV apps could be impossible.

Am I missing something here, or is this really a major problem? I really have trouble believing that such a fundamental feature could be missing from such an expensive Apple router... A device touted as, in some ways, the ultimate home router, given its compatibility with Apple devices, all the bells and whistles one usually wants in a router (dual band antenna, guest network capability, USB capability, etc). Is there not some way to simply enable UPnP and be done with it, so that my Xbox360 and my HDTV will go back to working, simply, as they did with my previous D-Link router? Or am I just screwed?

Any advice or insights into this matter would be greatly appreciated. Thank you all for any help you can provide.

Kindest regards...

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"eEye has discovered three vulnerabilities within Microsoft's UPnP implementation: a remotely exploitable buffer overflow that allows an attacker gain SYSTEM level access to any default installation of Windows XP, a Denial of Service (DoS) attack, and a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. eEye would like to stress the extreme seriousness of this vulnerability. Network administrators are urged to immediately install the patch released by Microsoft at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS01-059.asp"

"The most serious of the three Windows XP vulnerabilities is the remotely exploitable buffer overflow. It is possible for an attacker to write custom exploit code that will allow them to execute commands with SYSTEM level access, the highest level of access within Windows XP."

"The other two vulnerabilities are types of denial of service attacks. The first is a fairly straightforward denial of service attack, which allows an attacker to remotely crash any Windows XP system. The crash will require Windows XP users to physically power down their machines and start them up again before the system will function. The second denial of service attack is a distributed denial of service attack. This vulnerability allows attackers to remotely command many Windows XP systems at once in an effort to make them flood/attack a single host."

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rceee said:

Yeap, I did. If there's no upnp, how can the router know where to forward the ports to at the 360?

And what about the HDTV's video streaming apps (Netflix etc)?

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rceee said:

Thanks, I will definitely go read that now.

But to answer your questions: the 360 is connected wirelessly to the AEBS, as is the HDTV (a Vizio HDTV with built-in streaming apps like Netflix, Hulu, Vudu, and Amazon Video on Demand-I assume they all use differing ports, etc).

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rceee said:

I do... Correct me if I'm wrong but I thought the NAT feature was Apple's version of upnp (I forget the name ATM)... Same function, but not compatible with non apple stuff, etc...

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rceee said:

Thanks; actually what I was referring to in the last post was NAT-PNP.

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rceee said:

Not really :/

I tried putting the 360 on a static IP, doing port forwarding for all the ports listed for the 360, and even putting the 360 as the aebu's default host or whatever (the DMZ). Tried both manual and automatic settings on the 360 side.

The 360 connects to the network and the Internet fine when running the test. But then for the the last test, it always comes back saying that performance will have a problem because NAT type is strict. Even the tip on the 360 says to open a port that is already being forwarded to it. Weird.

I can do basic Internet stuff on it, so I guess that's okay... But I have a feeling some XBL stuff won't work right, like multiplayer, live chat, etc. And I've noticed some random disconnections from XBL while playing games.

Weird huh?

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