What I did on my vacation from reality

I finally got around to getting my girlfriend’s Xbox 360 wired up. Yay me.

Now, I hit a snag, when I was first starting out. Snag numero uno was that the Xbox didn’t want to eat the DHCP lease I was feeding it.

Note: this is not an iptables masquerading tutorial-ish post.

Eventually, I ran across a post on some Xbox forum site that said to try using 192.168.1.*. Ladies and gentlemen, I shit you not, this fixed the problem. Here are the two DHCP network declarations I’m using (inside a shared-network segment):

shared-network HATINGLIFE
{
        subnet 192.168.1.0
        netmask 255.255.255.0
        {
                range   192.168.1.100   192.168.1.254;

                authoritative;

                option  domain-name             "XBOX";
                option  domain-name-servers     192.168.1.1,192.168.1.2;
                option  routers                 192.168.1.1;
                allow   unknown-clients;
        }

        subnet  10.0.0.0
        netmask 255.0.0.0
        {
                authoritative;

                range   10.56.83.100    10.56.83.254;

                option  domain-name             "MASQ";
                option  domain-name-servers     10.56.83.1, 10.56.83.2;
                option  routers                 10.56.83.1;

                max-lease-time                  300;
                default-lease-time              60;

                allow   unknown-clients;
        }
}

When I comment out the 192.168.1.0/24 net, bringing it to the 10/8 net, it horks at the “IP Address” section of the “Test Xbox Live Connection” screen. When I put it on the 192.168.1.0/24 net, it works fine.

I’d like to take this opportunity to punch the Xbox devs in the face. (I’d also like to point out that there’s nothing else magical going on in dhcpd.conf; just another network (192.168.0.0/24) and a couple of host declarations.

Next step is getting the mics working, but as we don’t have one (handy?), I’ll care about that later. Besides, I’m more interested in firewall rules for SOCOM 3 for my Playstation 2.

Edit: It seems the same thing happens with her XP laptop. Dooh. Also, SOCOM 3 didn’t need any special firewall rules (I have a shit-ton of firewall rules; it’s very flexible).