Internet woes

I’ve searched (hell, even posted) about this in the past, but it’s come up again so here I am. To make a long story short, I live in a certain well-known and rightly maligned furnished apartment chain where the internet is provided via a dumb HDMI dongle. I need to enable port forwarding. It doesn’t seem possible to do through their stupid dongle-provided wifi, and so I’ve tried hooking up my own router. Problem is, in doing that I’ve run into other issues that have distracted me from even figuring the port forwarding out. For reference, the two routers I have (one I had when I moved in, the other a kikoku-ing friend gave me a while back) are an Apple AirPort Express (A1392) bought in the US some years ago and a Buffalo WSR-300HP bought in Japan, probably in 2019 or so. These new problems are the same regardless of which router I attempt to use, but are not an issue when using the provided dongle as a router.

First new issue is that my Xbox can’t connect to the internet, or at least not Xbox Live. When joining the network or connecting directly to either router with a LAN cable, it will *say* it has successfully connected to the internet, but then I won’t have access. Occasionally I can see for a moment that it *is* online (showing internet content, for lack of better explanation) but only for at most 5 seconds before it locks me out again. Selecting the Test Network Connection option in the network settings will tell me that additional authentication is needed and then ask me to either enter additional authentication information or enter an alternate MAC address and then presents me with two options: Authenticate Now and Enter Alternate MAC address. The first option will take me to a page that says http://[ip address]/login.cgi?[bunch of letters and numbers] at the tip with a white box saying Authentication Failed. The second option lets me enter a new MAC address and restart the console, but doing that (and entering what various online guides have said to enter) does not work either.

Incidentally, the same Authentication Failed page pops up on both my laptop and phone when first joining the network, but can be cleared and then I have internet access as normal. Again, no idea why. If I enter the [ip address]/login.cgi into a browser it prompts for a login and password, with admin filled in as the login. Nothing I can think to try is accepted.

The second new issue is that I can no longer make/receive video calls of any kind; FaceTime, Facebook Messenger, Zoom, etc. all fail the moment the call attempts to connect. I can ring out or they can ring in, but as soon as the person being called answers it automatically fails. Like the Xbox problem, this doesn’t happen on the dongle.

And of course all of this is on top of the initial problem: I need to enable port forwarding so that I can use Foundry VTT to run D&D games as detailed [here](https://foundryvtt.com/article/port-forwarding/).

I’d be very grateful for any help anyone can give, I spent the whole weekend trying to figure this mess out and I guess I’ll be back at it when I get home tonight as well.