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Author Topic: 2 Routers Together Causing Me Problems (long)  (Read 65 times)

taz1975uk

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2 Routers Together Causing Me Problems (long)
« on: December 18, 2003, 02:37:00 AM »

Are you running a firewall?

if so which one, and have you tried taking yourself outside the firewall to test to see if that works?
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cybrpunk

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2 Routers Together Causing Me Problems (long)
« Reply #1 on: December 18, 2003, 05:52:00 AM »

QUOTE
I am running into problems with XLink and XBConnect. I have the ports 34518, 34519, 8602 and 6703 (all UDP) forwarded to the IP address of the PC that's running XLink and XBConnect on both the DI-514 and the RT314.


I think that this may be the source of your problems.   Does your network look like this:

Internet --->  Router 1 ---> Router 2 with both PC and XBox connected
                                                 
or this:

Internet ---> Router 1 with PC connected ---> Router 2 with XBox connected
                   
The first configuration would be able to work if you setup the port forwarding correctly.  Router 1 must pass packets to the public address of router 2, which would then pass those packets on to the private IP address of your PC.  The second will not work because the router filters broadcast traffic, which is how the Xbox is found on the network by XLink (and other tunneling softwares).

Do you see your local XBox in either program?
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taz1975uk

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2 Routers Together Causing Me Problems (long)
« Reply #2 on: December 18, 2003, 09:15:00 AM »

QUOTE (burgerboy @ Dec 18 2003, 06:08 PM)

Can someone shed some light on xtest?

instructions on this post

http://forums.xbox-s...=46&t=100605&s=
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cybrpunk

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2 Routers Together Causing Me Problems (long)
« Reply #3 on: December 19, 2003, 04:08:00 AM »

"Broadcast traffic" is how network devices find each other on a network when there's no way to resolve a name to an IP or MAC address.  This is a very common practice in many protocols used on data networks.  In the absence of DNS or WINS servers to perform the functions of name to address mapping it's one of the few other ways for devices on an IP based network to find each other (I won't go into hosts and lmhosts files).

To describe it very simply -

When one network device wants to reach another on the network it sends out what's called a "Broadcast" announcing to the network that it's looking for "X".  All of the devices on the local network receive this packet, but only "X" responds back and says "I'm here!".  It's easy for "X" to respond because the originating address is contained within the initial broadcast.  So now both network devices have each other's addresses and can start using those for direct communication.

A routers job is to filter these broadcasts and create seperate "segments" on a network.  If your XBox and PC are not on the same segment, XLink will not be able to find your MAC address - period.  This means you cannot have a router between your XBox and PC and have any hope of it working - ever.

If you look at any XTest you'll see a line that shows the XBox MAC address pointing to the broadcast address that looks like:

0050f2xxxxxx --> FFFFFFFFFFFF

An address populated with all 1's (in binary) is considered the broadcast address. That's why, on an IP network, you cannot use the .255 address of the network for one of your network devices (in subnetted networks this may vary).

I hope this clears up a few things for you - and possibly others out there as well.
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