Master Chef you are THE man, first of all. You have created the best guide to opening NAT I have ever seen, and you make it so simple!
But PLEASE, save me! Okay, here's the story. I'm from San Diego, but I recently moved to TJ, Mexico, and I play Xbox Live a lot. I recently got my internet set up over here and I can tell there's something wrong with my NAT.
I go to play games on Left 4 Dead 2 and if I enter an 8 person Versus game I can't even connect past the loading screen. It tells me "There was a problem with your connection." or some BS. But I can play 4 player Campaign games. I did some research on the web and found out that error message is the direct result of NAT.
So, me living in Mexico, this is very difficult for me, but I would be able to manage, but I have a particular problem I don't think anyone else has been faced with.
My router is a Huawei EchoLifeHG520c, it's so new in its existence it's not even on that ultimate list of routers. And its predecessors have an option for NAT in the router page, but this one doesn't!! The only option concerning NAT is two ticker boxes. One says "Active" and the other, "Unactive."
I did a lot of research on the internet and it seems others have the same problem as me here in Mexico. I read a guide that explained how to do it and I followed the steps, but I still can't get into any matches on L4D2, and I think it affects how well I find games on my other games too.
There's an option in the Advanced Settings that says "Firewall," and it has an option for Permitting individual applications past the Firewall, and it has a very similar layout to port forwarding, being that you name the application, put All on the protocol, put the starting and ending ports, blah blah blah. So I did this with the four ports and at FIRST I couldn't even log into Xbox Live as it said my MTU Setting wasn't sufficient, but I rearranged the order of the ports according to that guide you posted, and voila, it worked. So now I have the idea that that was exactly what I needed to do. But alas, I STILL cannot get into 8 player games on L4D2, I've spent many hours trying to figure this out and I'm afraid to say I'm on the verge of giving up but I don't want to! Is there anything you can tell me to help me out?
EDIT: And my router is a two in one deal, it is literally the modem and the router put together.
[Edited on 10.15.2010 8:39 AM PDT]