total.pardo

the damnedest thing happened a few months ago when i updated the old wrt54g v1.1 router to a more respectable firmware - tomato v 1.26.

i asked on this thread:

http://www.linksysinfo.org/forums/showthread.php?t=59024

I have searched for this issue elsewhere to no avail. All I did find was the same reference with a few similar responses on the team xbox forums.

Hopefully someone here has seen this and has some ideas on how to resolve.

My setup is:

WRT54g v.1.1 flashed successfully to latest Tomato firmware. Wired PC, wireless MBP, wired Xbox360. All worked without issue before flashing. All work now except:

The 360 cannot connect to Xbox Live unless I force a “Test Connection to Xbox Live”. It goes through a process of verifying IP address, DNS, NAT, etc. Once this is done, the 360 is able to get onto the Internet and everything works fine (ports are forwarded and the 360 detects it as ‘Open’ NAT, aka none).

The 360 is set static and wired. The correct ports are forwarded. (Same as they were with the Linksys software.) I have the 360’s IP in the DMZ (and have tried it with out it in the DMZ).

nothing worked - and i, of course, tried everything that logically made sense until this poster jvro applied the proverbial brick-to-the-side-of-the-head trick:

To me it seems that if you enable DHCP and makes your Xbox get an IP that way (you can always pre-decide which IP it gets delt in Tomato anyway) you don’t have have that issue anymore.

The above combined with activation uPnP fixed the problem for me (not sure if the uPnP is nessesary though but was for me because of my provider and me being able to get “open” access to live).

I was experiencing the exact same problem as described in this thread and the above fixed (as well as for a friend of mine)

Seems to me that this could be related to the xbox firmware and that when it’s set to DHCP it does “more” than when it’s configured with a static ip.

and, as you would suspect, it works like a charm.  the key was to assign the MAC addy of the 360 to a statically selected IP in the router.  that way the usual port forwarding and DMZ settings would always be applied, the console would remain open, and would log in to LIVE automatically…without the network test.

sometime the solution you know shouldn’t work, works.

now, on to some gaming…