A good thing to think about is to not have the X-box on the same network as all the other stuff if you can avoid it. If you have the ability to separate it with its own physical network or if need be V-Lan (better than nothing) its a good thing.

Could someone please elaborate on this? I am a total noob at networking and such.

Thanks!

Ok lets make a quick and a quite simplified walkthrough.

You have a firewall/broadband router/nat device to block direct contact between your machines and the Internet with all the dangers out there.

One reason for having this device (firewall...) is that many softwares have bugs in them, or are misconfigured and thus can get compromised.

When you make holes through the firewall into your equipment you essentially take away or minimizes the protection of the firewall for that hole.

That is why you want the hole to be as small as possible ie if you can open one single port for a ip address, it is better than opening a whole ip address with all the ports. The less you expose the less vulnerabilities are available for the hacker/worm/virus to explore.

One reason why you would want to separate the computer you are exposing to the Internet from all the other computers is that if it gets compromised ie someone hacks it and takes control of it, they will se whatever that computer sees.

That means that IF the computer is placed on a separate network from the other computers, then it will not see/have direct contact with the other computers and hopefully that would mean that you only would loose one computer and have to reinstall that one instead of reinstalling all of them.

HTH

Ahh i see!

So what steps should i be taking to make everything work?

Well the first thing you need to do is to decide your network topology ie how do you want things to look and weight pros and cons against eachother.

a tip might be that the xbox does not use dhcp only static address.

When you have the design you want ( do you want to use a DMZ or not?) then you go to the support forum of your buffaloairstation and ask them on how to do it. Basically the same question you asked here, but now you already know the ports you need to open.

The reason that we can not answer exactly how you do it here is that every maker have their own way of doing things. A cisco device is not configured in the same way as fx a d-link, clavister, fortinet or buffalo device, not even the terminology is the same. If we (cisco ppl) speak of default gateway here, then they (other vendors) might call it gw-world or gateway of last resort. It means the same thing but the terminology and how to set things up is not the same.

In a cisco device you would have made statics for the ports and ip addresses needed and then added access-lists allow the traffic through. But since noone here seems to have a buffalo airstation noone knows how they do it in a buffalo device.

So it is not that we do not want to help you it is just that you are in the wrong forum, you need people who knows buffalo airstations and how they are configured. so go to http://www.buffalo-technology.com/home/ and choose support and look there for how to open ports.

HTH