‘Black Ops’ has become an obsession with me.  Often my dreams are filled with the crack of gunfire and the guttural gurgling of fallen comrades and enemies.  When not working, I find myself looking at others’ game play videos on YouTube to find the best weapon load outs or what perks go best with what.  I’m completely in love with this first person shooter.  There are many who would argue that it is not the best in the series but I could care less.  That being said, I have had a great deal of trouble connecting to the servers and, once connected, staying on them.  Being a fairly savvy network type I traced it back to the configuration of my router at home.  A few quick Google searches and I found the ports that ‘Black Ops’ requires to be opened in order to optimize my game play.

What is NAT?  NAT stands for Network Address Translation.  It is the only way that the internet is possible today.  There are millions more devices on the internet than there are internet addressable IP addresses.  What NAT does for us is allow many devices to share one internet IP address.  Most internet providers supply their customers with a router which has wireless and all sorts of other bells and whistles.  Among these whistles and bells NAT is intrinsic.  As devices connect to the router it hands them IP addresses in the ranges: 10.0.0.0-10.255.255.255, 172.16.0.0-172.31.255.255, 198.168.0.0-192.168.255.255.  These addresses will NEVER get anywhere on the internet.  They are not routed by internet devices.  When a router is connected to the ISP it is given an internet route-able IP address.  As devices contact other devices on the internet they flow through the router.  When a connection is made through the router a dynamic port is configured which the router associates with that connection.  In this way, the router is able to keep track of connections from many devices using a single IP address.

When is NAT a problem?  When you have devices connected to the router, devices on the internet cannot contact them unless the connections are configured on the router.  With ‘Black Ops’ those connections are made to the PS3 on TCP ports 80,81,443,3074, and 5223 and on UDP ports 3074,3075, and 3478.  In multiplayer game mode there are three NAT ‘types,’ strict, moderate, and open.  Of these open is the one to have.  Since I’ve been playing the ‘Call of Duty’ series I have always had a NAT type of moderate.  This hasn’t been an issue until recently when I became so obsessed with the game.  Enough with the rant, here is the configuration on my Cisco 881 router that allowed my to go from moderate to open NAT:

ip nat inside source static tcp <PS3 IP Address> 80 interface FastEthernet4 80
ip nat inside source static tcp <PS3 IP Address> 81 interface FastEthernet4 81
ip nat inside source static tcp <PS3 IP Address> 443 interface FastEthernet4 443
ip nat inside source static tcp <PS3 IP Address> 3074 interface FastEthernet4 3074
ip nat inside source static tcp <PS3 IP Address> 5223 interface FastEthernet4 5223
ip nat inside source static udp <PS3 IP Address> 3074 interface FastEthernet4 3074
ip nat inside source static udp <PS3 IP Address> 3075 interface FastEthernet4 3075
ip nat inside source static udp <PS3 IP Address> 3478 interface FastEthernet4 3478

access-list 150 remark COD-BlackOps
access-list 150 permit tcp any host <PS3 IP Address> eq www
access-list 150 permit tcp any host <PS3 IP Address> eq 81
access-list 150 permit tcp any host <PS3 IP Address> eq 443
access-list 150 permit tcp any host <PS3 IP Address> eq 3074
access-list 150 permit tcp any host <PS3 IP Address> eq 5223
access-list 150 permit udp any host <PS3 IP Address> eq 3074
access-list 150 permit udp any host <PS3 IP Address> eq 3075
access-list 150 permit udp any host <PS3 IP Address> eq 3478

This of course requires that you have a static IP address assigned to your PS3.