Mar. 2nd, 2007 09:44 am
The Saga of the Xbox
Last Friday I finally succumbed to the (nearly) inevitable and picked up an Xbox 360 and a couple of games. Enough of my friends have them that I'll have plenty of folks to play online with. That is, if I could get the damn thing to work.
The unit itself appeared to work fine. I was even able to set it up and connect to the Xbox Live service last weekend. I encountered issues playing online with a friend but we were able to do so for a short time. Come Monday, however, the Xbox behaved as if the Xbox Live service didn't exist. I finally solve the problem yesterday.
Admittedly, my network topology is a little unusual but nothing that shouldn't work. The Xbox is connected via a network cable to the LAN port on the Media Center PC. The two network connections are bridged in Windows so it will pass through network traffic to and from the Xbox. In turn, the MC PC is connected via a Linksys wireless adapter to a Linksys wireless range expander. That acts as a relay to the Linksys wireless access point and router since, without it, the WAP doesn't reach the living room reliably. The router is connected to the cable modem and so on. The router is running third-party open source firmware called DD-WRT. The router is basically a computer in its own right and there are several alternate firmware packages available. DD-WRT provides me with additional functionality over the stock firmware such as the ability to increase the transmitter power, QoS capability, extended status and monitoring capacity, support for dynamic DNS services (I currently use DynDNS), and so forth.
To troubleshoot the problem, I tried everything I could think of. I set the Xbox up with a static IP address, I set up port forwarding and port triggering on the router, I put the Xbox in the DMZ (where all incoming requests are routed to it), I turned on Universal Plug 'n' Play support on the router, all to no avail. The Xbox has a series of tests it performs for network connectivity and it passed all of them except for the one where it actually connects to the Live server. I was getting rather frustrated since it was working previously and all my research indicated that this setup should work. Bridging works, the Xbox is known to work with DD-WRT, etc.
While talking with a couple of friends yesterday at lunch I had an additional thought. Last weekend, after I had initially set up the Xbox, I had reduced the transmission power of the wireless router. I did this because I had been encountering some unreliability in the wireless connections on my laptop and the MC PC. I suspected that the power setting it was at was causing the computers to connect directly to it instead of via the range expander. It appeared that I was correct as the connections became more reliable. If that was indeed what was happening, could it be that the range expander was the cause of the problem? If the MC PC, which the Xbox was bridged through, was now using the range expander instead of the router directly, it could be.
The range expander, like the router, is essentially a small special-purpose computer and it also has a web-based configuration interface. I downloaded the manual from Linksys and checked to see if there was any setting that might have an effect. Since it basically acts as a repeater, the only settings are those that deal with the SSID, wireless encryption, admin password, etc. I did notice that there was new firmware available so I downloaded it and used it to upgrade the range expander.
And now it all... just... works....
The unit itself appeared to work fine. I was even able to set it up and connect to the Xbox Live service last weekend. I encountered issues playing online with a friend but we were able to do so for a short time. Come Monday, however, the Xbox behaved as if the Xbox Live service didn't exist. I finally solve the problem yesterday.
Admittedly, my network topology is a little unusual but nothing that shouldn't work. The Xbox is connected via a network cable to the LAN port on the Media Center PC. The two network connections are bridged in Windows so it will pass through network traffic to and from the Xbox. In turn, the MC PC is connected via a Linksys wireless adapter to a Linksys wireless range expander. That acts as a relay to the Linksys wireless access point and router since, without it, the WAP doesn't reach the living room reliably. The router is connected to the cable modem and so on. The router is running third-party open source firmware called DD-WRT. The router is basically a computer in its own right and there are several alternate firmware packages available. DD-WRT provides me with additional functionality over the stock firmware such as the ability to increase the transmitter power, QoS capability, extended status and monitoring capacity, support for dynamic DNS services (I currently use DynDNS), and so forth.
To troubleshoot the problem, I tried everything I could think of. I set the Xbox up with a static IP address, I set up port forwarding and port triggering on the router, I put the Xbox in the DMZ (where all incoming requests are routed to it), I turned on Universal Plug 'n' Play support on the router, all to no avail. The Xbox has a series of tests it performs for network connectivity and it passed all of them except for the one where it actually connects to the Live server. I was getting rather frustrated since it was working previously and all my research indicated that this setup should work. Bridging works, the Xbox is known to work with DD-WRT, etc.
While talking with a couple of friends yesterday at lunch I had an additional thought. Last weekend, after I had initially set up the Xbox, I had reduced the transmission power of the wireless router. I did this because I had been encountering some unreliability in the wireless connections on my laptop and the MC PC. I suspected that the power setting it was at was causing the computers to connect directly to it instead of via the range expander. It appeared that I was correct as the connections became more reliable. If that was indeed what was happening, could it be that the range expander was the cause of the problem? If the MC PC, which the Xbox was bridged through, was now using the range expander instead of the router directly, it could be.
The range expander, like the router, is essentially a small special-purpose computer and it also has a web-based configuration interface. I downloaded the manual from Linksys and checked to see if there was any setting that might have an effect. Since it basically acts as a repeater, the only settings are those that deal with the SSID, wireless encryption, admin password, etc. I did notice that there was new firmware available so I downloaded it and used it to upgrade the range expander.
And now it all... just... works....