Xbox Live Firewall Settings
For some reason, the other night when I was trying to play some Gears with my brothers, my Xbox Live connection was freaking out ... I couldn't connect to a hosted game and I was seeing lots of lag. Lag! I haven't seen lag like that since Quake CTF over a 56kbps modem.
So, at some point I must have changed one of my routers or switches, because when I went to check my network connections I got a "Moderate" for my NAT settings. Ah, so I must have to tweak some firewall settings. Funny I didn't have this problem before. Well, since I'm pretty sure I'm not going to find "Old Pentium running shorewall on Gentoo" on the list of Xbox Live certified devices, I try to find out what port forwarding I need to do.
Here we go: "Xbox 360: Port settings for Xbox Live". Looks like port 88 UDP and port 3074 UDP and TCP. So I put those rules in the firewall, reload the config, and test the network connection again. Now I get "Strict" instead of "Moderate"! That's no good. Well, it turns out that you have to route TCP on port 88 as well as UDP ... I put that rule in as well and now everything works as it should.
So, moral of this story: forward both UDP and TCP traffic on ports 88 and 3074. Port 88, eh? I never knew that Xbox Live used Kerberos. Learn something new every day.