Since mid-August I have not been able to connect to my Realm over wi-fi.
The realm appears in the list in the Realms tab but when I try to enter it sits on the "This may take a few moments" message for a long time before the "Unable to connect to realm. Failed attempting to join realm. Please try again later."
I have an iPhone 6 Plus running iOS v9.3.5 with Minecraft PE v0.15.7. My son uses an old iPad 2 (iOS 9.3.4, Minecraft PE 0.15.6 ) which is also unable to connect with the same symptoms.
Both devices can see and join each other's shared worlds over the LAN. It is just the paid realm service that is not connecting. It was working well for both devices until mid-August.
Internet connectivity is not an issue as web browsing, video-on-demand streaming etc is working to the same devices. These devices on different wi-fi networks in Japan exhibit the same behavior. Our friends we have invited to the realm also can no longer log in from their own home networks.
Interestingly, now I can connect to the realm over the phone carrier's 4G network which was not possible before. But my son's device and his friend's devices are wi-fi only devices and can't connect.
Other family members in Australia can connect from iPads over their own wi-fi. Is this a Japan-only problem?
Also, after the error message the realm listing shows 1 player connected when in fact I could not connect. When I change a setting in the realm options and save it gives me a disconnected message as if I was connected.
The Mojang help page mentions that ports 26000-28000, 80, 443 need to be open at a firewall but from an iPad or iPhone I could not find mention of a firewall function or how to open ports.
There is no point in keeping a realm that can not be connected to. Thank you in advance for your help.
Addition: A friend who also can't connect is running Android 5.0 and Minecraft 0.15.7. He can't connect over 4G with the message that wi-fi is required to play with friends. He can't connect over wi-fi at home with the above error. But he has an older phone running Android 4.3 with Minecraft 0.15.7 that can connect to the realm over wi-fi.
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FYI I contacted the developer a month ago with a detailed analysis of the problem but I haven't got no responses so far.
I am happy that I can now connect over 4G even if it is considered a defect. But others seem to be restricted to wi-fi and not able to connect to the realm. The whole point of the realm is the ease of playing together for anyone. It has been a month. If really this stays broken then I will have no option but to unsubscribe. I'm now concerned about any way to back up the realm world that has been made so it can be migrated to a more stable accessible environment later so the kids can continue creating where they left off. If there is no way to do this I will be really hopping mad. Does anyone have experience with migrating a realm?
I am also having the same issue, and I live in Japan. I used to be able to connect to my realms (from iPhone 6 plus, iPad Air, Nexus tablet) from my home wifi but ever since Aug 10 (when I updated to 0.15.6), I also get the "this may take a while" screen, then to "could not connect, please try again later".
I can connect by mobile data and also from free wifi (docomo wifi, Japan Free wifi) and also from my friends home wifi (we have the same brand router, Buffalo). I've had my ISP check their lines, plus called up Buffalo but they can't find any issues.
I'm perplexed as 4 friends can connect over their home wifi, but 3 of us (I'm the owner) can't. I'm currently using mobile data and free wifi at Starbucks on the weekends...
@unknown and @unknown:
As I said before I have set up a VPN server on a different network (it's actually located in an IDC in Japan) to capture packets being transmitted between my iPad and Realms servers. By analyzing packets I have discovered a really weird behavior of those servers. The game communicates with servers on 27340/udp but the server requires that both the source port and the destination port of UDP packets to be the same, which is unnecessary and only harmful requirement because any NATs may change the source port of outgoing packets. The reason why you can connect to realms via 4G but not your home wifi router is probably that the latter is doing NAT without preserving the source port. It is very likely that their firewall for realms servers is somehow misconfigured.
My VPN server is specifically configured so that it tries its best to preserve the source port so I can connect to realms via the VPN flawlessly.
I have reported all of my analysis internally to developers but sadly they haven't fixed it yet. At least they know the problem so I hope they'll fix it soon.
OMG I'm so embarrassed about throwing a mini fit. Wow, though, it's been a year already.
Is Racknet configured to try successively lower MTU's? It does that by default. Seems like when I was poking around last year, it seemed to be a MTU issue with my ISP.
Thanks for checking back! We had several tests on IPv6, IPv4+IPv6, NAT64+IPv6, etc to try to find the cause. The end cause was with networks configured with some half-faulty ICPM6 configuration that is needed for IPv6, which on normal circumstances would work fine, but RakNet is not normal 🙂
We had to force the downgrade of MTU on normal connections as well to fix this.
That is exactly what I've been experiencing since mid-August. For now I am using an OpenVPN server located on a different network to work around the problem. Even though the VPN server is also located in Japan it's still able to connect to realms for some reason.