Incoming Ports for Gaming?

[jsalmans]

As per usual, the most interesting part of my job always seems to come back to our on-campus students and their BYOD devices.

We've had some reports that Rainbow Six Siege is still having multiplayer issues despite most of those consoles/PCs being assigned public IP addresses (so no NAT required).  This doesn't surprise me too much since it is an Ubisoft game and I hear lots of bad things about their network stack.. plus I think a number of their games are designed around peer-to-peer once their servers handle the matchmaking part.

Now, NAT Type (essentially the indicator most of these games or consoles provide to the end user about their connectivity) apparently isn't actually just about NAT, it's also about ports.  Most of these game publishers have FAQs about what ports to open to the entire Internet.  I suspect Rainbow Six gameplay would benefit from opening some ports, especially if it actually is peer-to-peer.  We've also had some requests to open up ports that are for a number of Blizzard games and associated voice chat.

I'm curious what other people with Palo may be doing in situations like this.  I was considering if I could get custom applications made for these I could probably allow incoming connectivity so long as it matched one of the application types.  Opening up just ports seems like such a bad idea without knowing a source IP (which seems about impossible unless someone knows of some Minemeld miners for game servers) even to BYOD networks since we don't allow them to run their own routers/firewalls.

[OtakarKlier]

Hello,

I avoid using just ports if at all possible and only as a last resort. Check the logs to see why the traffic is getting blocked and allow only those applications to the specific destinations. This method should allow the traffic and still stay secure.

Regards,