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[smst]

Hi all. I'm having a weird networking problem which I suspect is caused by hardware failure. I'd be grateful for any ideas.

My Xbox is wired in to my home network, and everything works brilliantly -- it picks up an IP address through DHCP (configured to always be the same), and I have no problems connecting to SMB shares from XBMC or accessing the Internet.

However, occasionally (but more frequently recently) I find that I can't connect out at all. If I try (with XBMC again) to reach an SMB share, the request times out and the server logs don't mention the attempt. XBMC can't read the weather forecast during these periods also. From the MS dash (with the original BIOS), I can't reach the Internet either.

During these periods, strangely, I _can_ FTP in to the Xbox!

The problem usually fixes itself after a while without my intervention. I fear it may be some fault with the NIC, or possibly a bad connection on the X3 mod (although I have neither soldering skills nor tools, so I'm not well placed to fix it).

Any thoughts or suggested further tests would be appreciated.

Cheers,
Steve

PS After this afternoon's outage I realised that my Internet connection had independently gone down, so some of my tests were inconclusive. It would be great if that explained the lack of weather forecast etc, but I can't see how it would explain XBMC not connecting to a local share.