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My girlfriend and I use a program called Second Life. Cox internet has always been stellar for performance. Recently we got an upgraded router and suddenly we are having problems.
I recently got a Netgear R6350 router. Since I set it up we both have been experiencing random disconnects from Second Life. Otherwise the performance is still stellar. No lag spikes, no significant packet loss, just random disconnects up to an hour after logging in.
Second life uses both UDP and TCP
During router setup I used Netgear's Nighthawk app and let it use default settings
are there any special router settings needed by Cox that I should change?
Nothing special from Cox but perhaps something special your old router was doing. First see if UPnP will do the trick. See here on how to enable that. If that doesn't work, disable it and use port forwarding instead. See here on how and here are the ports
If you can't get that to work, see if there is a firewall setting you can adjust. Finally, you can always connect direct to the modem, reboot the modem and try a game then. If you get disconnects then, it's not a router issue.
Thanks for the awesome advice! I hope this works
I read up on it and it looks like port triggering would help with connection stability. I'm stuck on the outbound port number though. I can't provide a range of ports like I can with port forwarding. I need one port number and I don't know what to use.
Okay I set up port triggering. I set up a rule for every one of the ports listed except for the range (12000-29999) since I need a single outbound port number to trigger it. That one should not matter though since it just handles voice.
Waiting now to see if I get disconnected. Wish me luck!
Fingers crossed. So did UPnP not work?
UPnP did not work and I still got a disconnect with port triggering set up. I did forget to turn off UPnP before I set up port triggering though. UPnP is off now and waiting to see if I get another disconnect.
If that doesn't work I think the next step is to connect direct to the modem and see if you get disconnects then. I know you said the problem started when getting the new router, but who knows, maybe something else changed too. Maybe try looking at the logs to see what exactly is causing the disconnection. Maybe that will give you a clue on the port you can focus on. See here for info on finding logs.
I was looking closer at the ports being used and I think the important ones are UDP 3478, 3479. This is used for something called Session Traversal Utilities for NAT or STUN which is used by VOIP clients for voice chat. Not only does 2nd Life use it but so does the PS3, so if you have a PlayStation make sure you don't play at the same time you are playing 2nd Life.