Trouble with eSports

[LesG]

I'm a sysadmin at a small state college with limited experience with enterprise firewalls.

We have an issue with our eSports team computers and I suspect it may have something to do with uPnP.

We have two MX-250s configured for high availability and have no layer 7 rules or content filtering for gaming.

The users report that they are able to connect to various games and game lobbies, but are having issues with multiplayer scenarios that should be displaying other users, but are not. This causes the games to be somewhat unplayable, especially at the competitive level.

This issue is hard to describe because it varies wildly for each user. These computers are hosted in the same VLAN.
Are you familiar with these types of problems involving esports and enterprise firewalls?

[mlefebvre · Accepted solution]

The Meraki MX does not support UPNP, likely because it is a significant security risk. So I believe the gaming lobbies will be seeing them as behind a strict or moderate NAT at best and this can cause all sorts of connection issues in various games that would typically then need either port forwarding, 1:1 NAT or a consumer router to resolve. The best suggestion I have seen in the past (which I have not tested but did not see any negative feedback about) is that if you have an actual eSports team with dedicated computers or a dedicated LAN area for it, you might be able to grab a consumer router that supports UPNP, do a 1:1 NAT to it and have the gamers put just their gaming PC or console behind that.

[LesG]

Thank you, this is exactly the type of information I was looking for.