Issues with Xbox 360

["Councill, David" <david.councill () WSU EDU>]

Now that the fall semester has just started this week, I have received complaints from a number of residents of our 
residence halls that they are getting disconnects from Xbox Live. Getting information passed on to us can be difficult 
but with more information and some testing, the problem appears to only affect Xbox 360 (not Xbox 1) and only happens 
when more than one user tries to connect from the same dorm network. We are using PAT for each of our dorm networks, 
and the Microsoft answer is to open up ports on the firewall. But since we use PAT, we would still have to go to a 1:1 
NAT before we could do any port forwarding. There was a discussion on similar NAT issues with Xbox early this year 
(January) on this list relative to using Palo Alto firewalls thus I thought I would try this list again.

Right now, we are wondering why this problem just started occurring this semester as we haven't had problems in past 
years using PAT. The fact that it only affects the older Xboxes would indicate the issue is on Microsoft's side. Is 
anyone else seeing this problem? And how are you dealing with it? The only fix I see so far would be tracking the 
hundreds of Xboxes on campus and assigning them static or reserved IPs with a 1:1 NAT which seems to be impractical and 
time consuming.


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David Councill
Network Security Engineer
Washington State University
Information Technology Building | PO Box 641222 | Pullman, WA 99164
david.councill () wsu edu