Port Forwarding Issue

[IIIIIIIIIIIIIII]

Hi,

Apologies for the long post however I've tried to give as much detail as possible.  

My daughter has a Minecraft server which has been setup for years using port forwarding for the server and also for voice chat. We moved from BT to EE and set the relevant forwarding up for the server and the voice chat however whilst the server has no issues we're unable to get the voice chat to work.

We have tried changing the port however no matter what we select our testing returns that the port must be closed. This is despite everything on the router looking as it should. Whilst I'm fine setting up the forwarding etc I don't know as much as my daughter therefore I've had her send me (see below text) info regarding what she's done and how she has determined that it's the router/port that's the issue:

Hello I am currently having difficulty forwarding a port. I run a Minecraft server which is accessible to people outside my network on an ubuntu machine, however, recently I have been trying to get simple voice chat working which requires another separate open port. I tried to open the needed port from my router but it is still not open.

You may wonder how I know it is the port and not something I am doing. To determine this I went onto my ubuntu machine and did a tcpdump for the port I knew was open, and then used my phone on 4g to send udp packets to the public IP. This worked fine and I could see the packets coming in. I then tried the same with the port I didn't know if was open and I could not receive any packets.

I also did another test where instead of connecting to my minecraft server from the public ip with ddns, I connected with the private ip, when I did this voice chat was working. As well as obviously I could see packets through tcpdump. It's just external users that can't use voice chat. I'm not really sure what to do now since I've added the rule on my router but it's clearly not open.

In addition we have also tried following the relevant steps of turning off upnp and adding the port range back in. Have also tried different number ranges rather than the default 24454/udp.

Not sure if this is relevant/helpful. I had also read elsewhere that there's a brief handshake with tcp before routing voice over 24454/udp. As such I tried setting up the port over udp/tcp rather than just udp however when putting the range into internal the external port range turned red. From what I understand this occurs when there's an overlap however there's no other port forwarding with this range (or close to it). 

Smart Hub 7 Pro - Version 3.14.5

Any help would be greatly appreciated

[IIIIIIIIIIIIIII]

I'm guessing after rebooting it sets uPnP back to on? Anyway I tried deleting the greyed out PF rules and it won't allow me. Even more bizarre is another 2 greyed out entries have popped up also with zero as the end for the external port. 

[XRaySpeX]

What you call "the greyed out PF" are the rules that are auto generated by uPnP. Hence they have green ticks in the "uPnP" column.

[XRaySpeX]

Rebooting shouldn't change state of uPnP; Factory Reset would.

Test to confirm:

Firewall Config: uPnP ON > Switch it OFF & Save > uPnP OFF > Reboot > uPnP still OFF

[IIIIIIIIIIIIIII]

Yeah I only rebooted it (twice now) however its turned back on. That makes sense re the uPnP however it seems to be putting al the end's as zero.

[JimM11]

@IIIIIIIIIIIIIII It all depends on the landline phone you have, if they are the latest version and you connected them direct to the Dect management side off the EE Hub, then that is were all the phone numbers etc are stored in the EE Hub. If not that style and the phone is taking care of your phone book etc you do not have to worry about the EE hub then in the slightest. But from the link earlier, it's important to get ALL the devices that have uPnP off the connection to stop them getting on and setting there rules up first, disabling uPnP on the hub if it is even working etc etc. once done you just power up the hub leave it five minutes, then go look at your PF rules, all blank then you are good to go add your MC Server on save it reboot the hub and check that is working... It's an uphill battle until someone sit's down and takes a look at what is going on with it all, cannot be me as ditched EE now.

The PS5 stored the rule, kept it lying dormant and now seeing the EE Hub connected, went oops let's add it to the EE Hub just incase it's needed.

[IIIIIIIIIIIIIII]

The phone plugs directly into the EE hub (I believe its the 7 Pro) however we have all the numbers saved into our handsets. That said, if it was simply losing the numbers that's not much of an issue tbh.

Yeah factory reset it is. I'm just going to get all the settings off the router (my daughter has noip setup) and just want to make sure I have access to all the accounts to set DNS etc back up.

We have our parents living with us and as such, when we moved over to EE I changed the wifi network to the same as what we had for BT. So ID and password mirrored so they didn't have to change anything. I doubt this would have caused issues but thought I'd mention it.

[XRaySpeX]

It's not phones that plug into the router that could lose any nos.; such phones have their own phonebooks. It's the dedicated digital handsets that connect to the router over DECT signal who share the phonebook of the integrated DECT base station in the router.

[JimM11]

@IIIIIIIIIIIIIII The factory reset is always a very drastic way to sort out a Hub, personally just hate having to advise anyone to do it and for sure trying to make you aware off all the pitfalls, the SSID/Password change should not be causing any issues whatsoever with the EE Hub, in fact it's the very first thing i do with any new Hub, get rid off all the standard ones, the ssid, wifi password and the Admin password for the device. EE was fine, sky was fine, vodafone was not they are VERY restrictive in the password control that unit is back in the box for sure, just coming out shortly to see if they have fixed the landline oops they caused if so it may/may not go back on the connection. 

[IIIIIIIIIIIIIII]

The factory reset fixed the issue. I followed the steps in the linked post (excluded some of their DHCP/forwarding) and worked straight away after adding our relevant forwarding back in on it's own.

With regards to the uPnP. Currently still off but I'm guessing I turn it back on and if it causes issues then I simply turn it off again/leave it off?

Thank you for your help with this. I dragged my heels over the factory reset as I was worried it would cause more issues however it was actually pretty easy to get back up and running. I'll mark the linked post as a solution.