UPnP

What do people know about unervisal plug and play on routers?

I was looking at my connection transfer rates the other day and the router creates about 3kB local traffic each way.

I suppose this is 'probing' for devices but this seemed a little excessive to me but what do i know.

Can anyone explain it a little better?

cheers

[Frank]

UPnP is for opening ports dynamically in the router by applications that support UPnP (not many but MS claim that Messenger supports UPnP afaik).

http://hometoys.com/htinews/aug01/ar...osoft/upnp.htm

[rdhw]

Originally Posted by John Doe

I was looking at my connection transfer rates the other day and the router creates about 3kB local traffic each way.

Most of this traffic is generated by Windows, not the UPnP router. If you display the mini-icon for the "Internet Connection" in the system tray, Windows will query the router using UPnP for traffic figures every second, and these queries account for the traffic you have seen. If you uncheck the option to display the icon in the system tray, this traffic goes away.

UPnP solves a huge number of problems associated with applications running on PCs behind NAT routers, especially when those applications need to open ports for incoming connections, such as video or voice chat.

[abailey152]

Originally Posted by Keyser

UPnP is for opening ports dynamically in the router by applications that support UPnP (not many but MS claim that Messenger supports UPnP afaik).

http://hometoys.com/htinews/aug01/ar...osoft/upnp.htm

Yes, you need UPnP enabled to get certain MSN Messenger functions to work, Voice, WebCam etc. It is something to do with the dynamic port allocation I think.

*EDIT* BTW, If you don't want UPnP or just want to play with disabling/enabling it, there's a small util on Steve Gibson's site http://grc.com . The util's called UnPlug and Pray !!!

[rdhw]

Originally Posted by abailey152

If you don't want UPnP or just want to play with disabling/enabling it, there's a small util on Steve Gibson's site http://grc.com . The util's called UnPlug and Pray !!!

Pay no attention to the GRC site's comments on UPnP: they are mainly hysterical paranoia. The specific problem with the UPnP service in early copies of XP was fixed by a patch within a few weeks, and the fix was incorporated into Service Pack 1. If you are behind a NAT router, you were not at risk anyway.

Originally Posted by rdhw

Pay no attention to the GRC site's comments on UPnP: they are mainly hysterical paranoia.

Nicely put Robin.

I have used the router with upnp disabled. In fact I only turned it on recently to see what it did.

Yes i have noticed messenger in the upnp portable map, but didnt notice any problems in its operation when upnp was off. I had used vid/talk. There are also entries for other computers on the network.

I aim to find out specifically what generated this traffic. I deleted all the firewall software application rules last night so i have to allow applications access where the firewall cant auto configure. Network traffic is now 0 when idle.

[abailey152]

Originally Posted by rdhw

Pay no attention to the GRC site's comments on UPnP: they are mainly hysterical paranoia. The specific problem with the UPnP service in early copies of XP was fixed by a patch within a few weeks, and the fix was incorporated into Service Pack 1. If you are behind a NAT router, you were not at risk anyway.

Yes, I agree his comments are a little paranoid. I was just saying the util to dis(en)able UPnP is useful.