> Games consoles are the best example.
Not with you there bud - we have multiple game consoles and my firewall doesn’t even support UPNP. I also have never set up and DNAT or ‘punched holes’ in it to Mae them work. They just do.
Not with you there bud - we have multiple game consoles and my firewall doesn’t even support UPNP. I also have never set up and DNAT or ‘punched holes’ in it to Mae them work. They just do.
Out of the box on most consumer networks, you're going to be able to access things like the store, downloading updates etc.
To play with certain players on peer to peer games (which are less common these days) or have a voice chat with certain players, you will need to port forward (manually or with UPnP).
You either need to forward ports manually (which can obviously only be done to one console), or use UPnP. The Xbox One and later does have an option to manually ask it to use a different port on multiple consoles for some features (so that you can port forward separately to consoles), but I am unsure if that will solve all issues in such an environment.
What happens though is that another external port gets forwarded to 3074 instead.
3074 -> 3074
3075 -> 3074
3076 -> 3074 etc.
Its likely uPnP does this automatically as even uPnP won't be able to map multiple devices to the same external port but it does make the process convenient.
However, we're talking about a service listening behind NAT (in this case Call of Duty on an Xbox at home) that needs to be listening for connections initiated by other Xboxes to establish a P2P connection. This is what port forwarding enables and this is what uPnP automates.
Anyway, these days, if you don't have an IPv6 /56, you don't have a real Internet connection.