Tim Anderson's ITWriting

February 24, 2004

Xbox Live and ISA server

Sensible modern houses have an ethernet port in every room. Wireless, did you say? Fair enough, but I hate having to watch that little connection quality icon as it drifts from good to excellent or occasionally to poor. Wireless is for mobile computing (including around the house); but there's no sense in using wireless for fixed boxes such as an Xbox or home theatre PC.

So it was with these last two items in mind that I crawled under the floorboards last weekend to run an ethernet cable from the study to the living room. Mine is not a modern house. Home theatre PC is the next project. I get the impression that these things are not quite ready, but lving to some extent on the bleeding edge is part of journalism. Not sure whether it will be Windows Media Center or not; watch this space for more comments.

In the meantime, here's a tip for anyone trying to run Xbox Live behind ISA server. There's a well-known tip sheet by Aaron Shimmons which explains how to do this. It didn't work for me. The Xbox could find the Live server OK, but would not connect, reporting possible problems with the service. However if I connected to the ADSL router, bypassing ISA, it worked fine. I didn't want to do that, because it complicates the cabling, so I eventually found a solution for ISA. What I did was to create an additional Protocol Rule (under the Access Policy node in the ISA Management snap-in) for the four defined protocols mentioned in Aaron's article. Under Applies To, I created a new client set that includes only the Xbox. I've reserved a fixed internal IP for the Xbox in the DHCP server. Restarted the ISA service and Xbox Live sprang into life. Why is this necessary on my system but not on some others? No idea.