Xbox Live vs Time Warner Cable outage

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MathGuy42
Posts: 12
Joined: Wed Feb 09, 2011 8:37 am

Xbox Live vs Time Warner Cable outage

Post by MathGuy42 »

For the past 40 hours there has been a strange outage of Xbox Live for some Time Warner Cable customers (myself included). After seeing reports that sharing a laptop's Internet connection gets around the outage, I tried it myself and found that it works. I'm wondering if there's a way to set up a similar workaround in Gargoyle.

Here are more details of my setup:
Time Warner Cable Modem, Surfboard SBG6580, wireless disabled, works as a 4 port router
Netgear WNDR 3700v2, Gargoyle 1.5.7, connected to modem via Ethernet
Xbox usually connected to Netgear via Ethernet. To have an Open NAT, I have a static IP for the Xbox and forward ports 3074 (both) and 88 (UDP). 53 (both) and 80 (TCP) are also recommended, but were never necessary for me.

Testing the connection on my Xbox yields OK for Network and Internet, but no connection to XBL.

Once yesterday morning I tried connecting the Xbox directly to the modem and the XBL connection worked. After seeing my situation was widespread, I stopped experimenting. But now it's been 40 hours, so I'm back to tinkering. I can't try a direct modem connection again right now because it would disrupt my wife's Internet.

DMZ to the Xbox didn't work.

I can try this though: Connect my MacBook to the Netgear via Ethernet, then use Internet Sharing over wi-fi. Using this method, my Xbox can connect to XBL. The NAT is moderate, even after turning on UPnP on the Netgear, but it's better than no connection.

Even if there's no way to get the Gargoyle to act like my Mac, I'm wondering if the network experts here have any idea what is going on. Why can my Xbox connect to Xbox Live through my Mac or directly to the cable modem, but not through my Gargoyle router (even though the Mac is connecting to the Gargoyle router, which connects to the Time Warner Cable modem)? Both Microsoft and TWC aren't giving any real technical details of what is going on or how to work around it.

Thanks.

ispyisail
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Location: New Zealand

Re: Xbox Live vs Time Warner Cable outage

Post by ispyisail »

have you got a link to the solution you found?

MathGuy42
Posts: 12
Joined: Wed Feb 09, 2011 8:37 am

Re: Xbox Live vs Time Warner Cable outage

Post by MathGuy42 »

Thanks for the reply.

The solutions weren't really detailed, just comments to an article about the outage, such as this
http://kotaku.com/5945651/strange-xbox- ... t=52909823
and
http://kotaku.com/5945651/strange-xbox- ... t=52911624

However, my original post is hopefully moot now. The outage seems to be over. It's still listed at
http://support.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-live-status
but everything seems to be working fine now. A few posts on Twitter are also saying the outage is over.

I would still be curious on theories of why a laptop bridge would "fix" the problem. I doubt MIcrosoft or Time Warner Cable will ever say what the problem really was.

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