Despite forwarding all of these ports to my XBOX 360 and even enabling plug and play on my router, I could never get those annoying “Error: Your NAT type is set to strict (or moderate)” XBOX Live warnings to go away.
The ultimate solution for me was to put my XBOX 360 on my router’s DMZ (De-Militarized Zone). Keep in mind I’m running DD-WRT, so your settings might look a bit different.
Here’s how:
- Make sure you manually assign your XBOX an IP address via your router’s DHCP interface. Again, do not manually assign the IP address on the XBOX itself, but use the DHCP settings in your router to assign a static IP to your 360 (EDIT – actually, this doesn’t matter. Either way, manually assigned on the console or via DHCP, works).
- Go into the section of your router where you can assign an IP address to the DMZ. In DD-WRT, it’s in NAT / QoS -> DMZ. Click “Enable” next to “Use DMZ” and enter the XBOX 360′s IP address. Click Apply Settings to save your changes. Here’s a post how to do it on the vanilla Linksys firmware.
Aaah, no more friggin’ annoying Moderate NAT warnings! Now keep in mind, putting something on the DMZ is the same as having no router in front of it, so be sure you’re aware of the risks (in my estimation, it’s not a big deal on the XBOX, but I would NEVER do that on one of my PCs).
