[Rack] Opening up gaming ports

[Jonathan Lassoff]

On Sun, Aug 15, 2010 at 11:51 AM, Robert Fletcher
<lobatifricha at gmail.com> wrote:
> Salutations and greetings to our honorable Noisebridge ops team.
>
> I have a quick question/request for you.  We've been organizing a video
> gaming LAN party at Noisebridge on Saturday evenings for the past few weeks,
> but we've been unable to access outside servers to tap into some larger
> games.  I'm told by others who know more than I do that this could be
> because UDP ports 27000-27050 (for Valve games) are blocked by our
> firewall.  I was wondering if you might be able to open up those ports
> and/or make any other changes to the network that would keep us from playing
> online.  I'll be happy to drop in to help test settings one night this week
> if that would be of any use to you.  Also, in case it's useful, we were able
> to play online 3 weeks ago, but not for the past 2 weeks.

For what it's worth, I'm not really interested in supporting gaming at
Noisebridge since I don't think it really supports the ideals that
Noisebridge is founded upon.
That being said, I'm not totally against it either, and I'd like our
network to work for anyone and for any purpose, regardless of the
application.

As far as I know, there should be nothing outright blocking UDP
traffic, however it may not be getting NATed well (or at all). In the
current default route out of the network at Noisebridge, it will
direct you over our Monkeybrains link. Unfortunately, this will NAT
you twice (once internally, once inside of Monkeybrains), so heavy use
of many UDP sessions will be pretty heavy on intermediary NAT boxes.

If you want some lower-latency, single-NATed connectivity, you can:
 * Get an IP with DHCP
 * Manually change your default route to 172.30.0.1 (router that
routes over Sonic.net)

Cheers,
jof