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[RUFFRYD3R]

hi, im attending college right now and going to college I have to live in campus dorms. Anyway to the point people with xbox's in the dorm at one point in time were able to get on xbox live and play thru system link by using a mac address from a computer in the computer labs on campus...but any other ways were blocked by the system admins. Anyway, now the admins have blocked us from using these mac addresses somehow and we cant get on the network to play system link or on live, so i was wondering if anyone would have any solutions or suggestions to be able to get these working. We've already tried changing one letter or number in the MAC address and that worked for awhile, but then stopped working. so any help would be much appreciated. thanks.

[TheMuffinMan]

For the most part college campuses are fairly secure in regards to network security. If your room has an ethernet connection (I'm assuming it does) then a switch plugged into the wall jack, and then plugging your xbox into that may work. I currently have a similar setup with a router, though it sounds as if your school's network will not tolerate a router doign any router functions on it, which limits you to a switch. That will allow you internet access on everything connected to it, with using just the switch's mac address viewable to the outside network . Now if they have the actual ports banned for XBL, I'm not sure which ones it uses, then you're basically SOL, as that would require you to somehow bypass the port blocking (before by using an unblocked pc's mac address I'm guessing?) or something along those lines, definitely not something I would try to do on a college campus, my friends router took down my entire building's internet for 3 days just by enabling RIP on it by accident for about 10 seconds if that - not a good way to make friends.

[BCfosheezy]

QUOTE(RUFFRYD3R @ Mar 15 2006, 04:44 PM)

hi, im attending college right now and going to college I have to live in campus dorms. Anyway to the point people with xbox's in the dorm at one point in time were able to get on xbox live and play thru system link by using a mac address from a computer in the computer labs on campus...but any other ways were blocked by the system admins. Anyway, now the admins have blocked us from using these mac addresses somehow and we cant get on the network to play system link or on live, so i was wondering if anyone would have any solutions or suggestions to be able to get these working. We've already tried changing one letter or number in the MAC address and that worked for awhile, but then stopped working. so any help would be much appreciated. thanks.

It sounds like probably they had the known machines allowed on all ports. Then the rest of the pool were restricted to port 80. The network administrators probably saw a bandwidth spike and probed to see which port all the traffic was going across. They simply saw live's port numbers and blocked them from all machines. I think the only way to circumvent this is to tunnel all traffic across port 80. I guess you could set up a router and have your router send all the traffic it receives destined for the live servers to another server set outside your network listening on port 80. Since the packets were sent on port 80 your network administrators can't block it without denying you internet access. Then once the remote site receives the live packets it simply translates them back to the correct port and forwards them to the live servers. There are several downsides. #1 Writing the program and running it on this remote site is very difficult if you're not a programmer. #2 sending the packets to a remote site is time consuming and could make your games laggy.