Router/Firewall upgrade - or - Xbox peace at last!

Last night I switched my Soekeris net4801 router from m0n0wall to pfSense. I'd been running m0n0wall for several years and it had served me well. However recently I upgraded it to 1.3 and noticed that I had trouble getting NAT to work correctly for my 2 Son's XBOX 360. As the days past this had been causing more and more 'fun' with the eldest.

Before I upgraded their nat type would display as moderate and this would work fine for most things. After I upgraded to 1.3 the nat setting on their xbox dropped to strict. I tried several nat rules and short of putting their xbox's in the DMZ, and re-wiring their rooms, I was stumped.

I read up on alternatives that I could load on to my embedded Soekris box and it seemed pfSense, a fork from m0n0wall, looked a good candidate. It supported UPnP, which would allow the correct opening and closing of ports to forward traffic to their xboxes.

I downloaded the latest non-beta version and wrote it to the compact flash card in the router, not before having taken a backup of the latest m0n0wall config! I had to dig out my null modem cable and connect in to the router via serial interface to do the first configuration but after that it can all be looked after by a web interface or ssh.

All went well, I was even able to import my last m0n0wall config, after making some changes, to have it setup pretty much as I previously had. Only now I had the option to turn on UPnP and even configure it so that it would only affect certain hosts.
Ahhhh peace at last....

[5th Feb 2010 Here is a link to the network bunny site that has some more details on the xbox nat issue]
[9th Feb 2010 Had a reply on the m0n0wall mailing list. Here is a link to the authors page with details on how he got open nat working with m0n0wall]