Hosting a Tiger Woods 2006 game through a firewall

My parents gave me Tiger Woods 2006 golf for my birthday. It's quite fun, and reminds me of the old days playing Links 386 on our first PC.

Tiger Woods 06 supports playing over the Internet. Ben and I were going to play, but before I could host a game I had to figure out what ports to open up in my firewall. The first bit of information that I found was on Electronic Art's support site here. It didn't work, but I wasn't too surprised.

Tiger Woods has two Internet game modes, one using their game matching lobby, and the other Direct/LAN game. My guess is their instructions are for the gaming lobby, not the LAN game. So how did I find out which ports to open up? I had to look at my firewall/router logs to see what ports Ben was trying to connect on.

Here's what I did:

1. Find out your friend's IP. On Windows XP, the running IPCONFIG from the command prompt should list the IP address. If you're behind a router, you can go to IP Chicken to list your public IP address.
2. Look for the IP in your router's access log. On my router it has a message like: "Connection attempt to dst:xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:12345 was blocked", where 12345 is the port number it was trying to connect on.
3. Open up the ports to port forward to the internal IP address of the computer you're playing on. On my router, I forwarded the ports:
   
   
   
   • 2302-2308 TCP and UDP
   • 13505 TCP and UDP
     
   • 20803-20809 TCP and UDP
     

As far as the outcome of the game, Ben beat me, but it was close, so I'll have to practice up for a rematch.