Wacki can you help?

[NLSoldier]

Hey wacki, TSC reccomended you as someone who might be able to solve my computer/xbox live problem. Basically i cant connect to xbox live through my schools network. Please check out the official pissed about halo 2 thread for more info...

Anyone else who thinks they might be able to help feel free as well.

Thanks!

[MrGo]

Check with Xbox/Microsoft to see what port they use. It's more than likely your school is blocking that port on their firewall thus you can not connect.

[NLSoldier]

Well wehn i talked to the school, they said they were not blocking it, but that they did not have it as a high enough priority to establish a good connection...I dont think it is totally blocked cause wehn i go to the troubleshooter it establishes the various connections and then right at the end says it couldnt connect. If it was totally blocked i dont think it would be able to resolve the server or wahtever at all...

[wacki]

I don't have an XBOX, but I will try to help.

If you think it is a bandwidth problem, try connecting at off peak hours. If you still can't connect at 3 AM, then it is highly likely that you are being blocked and it is not a bandwidth/priority problem.

When you are connecting to the XBOX live server, does it give you a server name such as "livesever.xbox.microsoft.com", an ip address like "127.0.0.1" or anything like that? If you can find out the ip address or hostname of the server your xbox is trying to connect to, you can test the connection with a computer.

For instance, if you have windows XP you can click on start, then run and then type in cmd in the window and press enter. A black screen should pop up.

From there you can use:
nslookup (severname)
ping (server name / ip address) [A utility to determine whether a specific IP address is accessible]
or
tracert (servername) [this displays connection route from your computer to whatever server destination you type in]

Try playing around with these in the cmd window.
type
ping www.yahoo.com
nslookup www.yahoo.com
tracert www.yahoo.com

to see how they are supposed to work.

If you are using a router you can simply fire up xbox live, log into the router and look at the active connections.

You might want to PM astroglide and bring his attention to this thread. He is a network administrator and he deals with networks for a living. I don't know much about the xbox live protocol and I don't know how much help I can be in this situation.

[wacki]

I did a little googling and it looks like xbox live servers send out signals that might cause certain routers to fail. If you are behind a router, remove it and try again.

[NLSoldier]

Thanks for the help Wacki. I have tried connecting at like 3am on a weeknight and still nothing...Im not sure about the server name for xbox live but i could probably figure it out and try pinging it, thats a good idea. And im not using a router so that cant be the problem. If the ping thing doesnt work ill ask astro if he can help. Thanks again.

[Popinjay]

separate but related question, my college doesn't let bittorrent download any faster than 1kb/s. i can change the port it uses, but dont know what to use. any ideas?

[MrGo]

If you can't ping the server it doesn't necessarily mean that it won't work. It's very possible that your university has ICMP blocked. ICMP is the protocol that ping uses to verify connectivity to an end device/IP address.

[MrGo]

So the network admin's are telling you they prioritize network traffic? It's possible that this is set up on one of their edge routers that you go through, or possibly one of their core's.

If they are using Cisco equipment they most likely have an ACL (Access-list) configured to prioritize certain protocol traffic and allow certain bandwidth for that traffic. If that's the case then you're pretty much screwed unless you get into the router, but I wouldn't recommend doing that.

I would simply e-mail Microsoft or the XBox team and ask them.

[astroglide]

http://www.xbox.com/en-GB/live/start/connect/faq/