geekEleet

This week something truly magical happened to me, I finally acquired an Xbox 360 and let me tell you - it rocks.  I’ve been terrorizing Liberty City via Grand Theft Auto IV, and honing my driving skills at the track in Need For Speed: ProStreet.  One of the first things that I did was run a new network connection to my entertainment centre just for my shiny new Xbox. 

My original goal for setting up the network was to play with setting up the Xbox as a media extender, and in doing so I discovered that my Xbox needed some upgrades.  Most of the content that I view with my media centre PC is DIVX/XVID encoded videos and that doesn’t play very nicely with the Xbox.  There is hope though.  After doing some research, I discovered that the latest updates for the Xbox contain DIVX/XVID codecs.  Sweet.

[more]Maybe not.  I must have spent an hour in the console interface trying to figure out how to download updates.  After some Googling, I finally figured out that you need to connect to Xbox Live to make this happen.  No problem.  Xbox Live Silver is free of charge. 

Here in lies the rub.  While trying to configure my Xbox Live setup, the console informed me that there was a problem with the MTU setting of my router/modem.  Say what?  More specifically it was unable to get the MTU setting to validate it.  Since I use SmoothWall as a firewall/router, and the Xbox 360 is on the green network, I made the assumption that my smoothie was the problem.  The answer is actually quite simple and you can read all about it at the SmoothWall Community Forums.

To sum it up:

1. Set a static IP for your Xbox. In my case it’s 192.168.1.13 and it’s on my green network, and I set the IP on the Xbox itself.
2. In your Smoothie, under Networking click on the Incoming tab.
3. Forward ports TCP/UDP 88 and TCP/UDP 3074 to the Static IP set for you Xbox.
4. Under the Outgoing tab, allow ports 88 and 3074. (When you allow ports on the Outgoing tab, it automatically allows both UDP and TCP ports)

 

Note - If you specified a DNS server when setting your Xbox IP settings manually other than your Smoothwall, and you have a half-open network, you’ll need to allow port 53 (DNS) as an outbound port as well.

That’s it - quick and easy.  After making these changes, I was connected and updating in no time.