Do UPnP port forwarding setting "expire"?

[Chriscic]

Running AirVideo and Qloud on my WHS home server, which is on 24/7. Everything seemed to be working on my RT-N66U... I could see the ports forwarded via the system log/port forwarding screen.

Tested remote access yesterday and worked fine with both programs. A day later and I'm unable to access remotely and when I get home I see the port forwarding for these programs have fallen off the list and I have to reboot the machine to get them back.

My old Dlink router didn't have a problem with this. It never lost the UPnP set ports.

I'll try manual port forwarding but any other info. greatly appreciated. Note that I'd be glad to RTFM... if I could find it. I understand it's on the ASUS website, but all I can find there is the basic manual with very little info. Thanks!

 

[thiggins]

UPnP responds to app requests for opening and closing ports in the router firewall. Apps are supposed to close ports when they are done with them. But in my experience, I haven't seen apps be particularly diligent in doing this.

It could be that the ASUS automatically closes ports after an idle period and your D-Link didn't.

If you need the ports open all the time, open them manually.

 

[Chriscic]

Trying that, but now some entries are listed twice in system log/port forwarding since I set up manually and the programs must be requesting via UPNP as well. Does that hurt anything?

For example, I have the port for Qloud open (with duplicate entry), and infuriatingly I couldn't access it remotely today. It's driving me nuts that I can't get it to work consistently outside of my network (AirVideo seems reliable). I'm about to pull my hair out.

Also, it doesn't seem to make sense to have UPNP expire (at least not in a day) since the whole point is to be able to access outside of the network so you can activate the program to begin with.

Thanks for any additional thoughts.

 

[thiggins]

There should be a control to disable UPnP.

 

[Chriscic]

I realized I could disable automatic port forwarding in the individual apps. Others seems to be working just fine (I think) so don't want to turn UPNP off entirely.

I am concluding based on more testing that Qloud just doesn't like WHS for some reason. I did get it to stream outside of the network one time (not sure how), but other than that it will never work even though I can remote in via Splashtop and see both that the port is open on the router and properly selected in Qloud itself. Qloud also is working ok from my Win 7 PC.

Time to hit the Qloud forums and see if I can help them fix the bug.