University Students XBL


Uni XBL?  

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  1. 1. Uni XBL?

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Most of the students I have talked to say they cannot access the internet through their Xbox 360s in the dorm rooms.

I'm sure some of you are students, can you get XBL in your Uni Room?N

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I couldn't last year. Network blocked pretty much all UDP traffic and the relevant ports were blocked, and they certainly weren't interested in opening them up. I tried something using ICS and some frankly dodgy UDP over TCP tunneling, but XBL failed with an MTU complaint.

University of Gloucestershire

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Sad face. How about PC applications such as Spotify, I've heard they don't work either.

I was looking at buying the chatpad for 360 but with no XBL that's a total waste. Probably won't buy ODST either since no multiplayer = expensive SP expansion.

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It is possible, but you'll probably need to wait until you arrive and find out what the setup is like.

What uni are you going to?

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PSU, and yeah, you can't connect going straight to the xbox

so

do you have a router that can clone your computers mac address?

That is how our dorms determine if the connection will go through or not: does it see the right mac address? (the one registered to the connection, which I expect you'll do when you set it up).

Most if not all modern routers can clone your pcs max address, and thus anything hooked up to it will be seen like its your computer. Simple.

Alternately, you can go into xbox settings and set the mac address of its connection to the same as your computer.

Both work.

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is there a reason for this tyranny? why can't the dorms allow Xbox Live? if a kid wants to stay up all night gaming then fail finals it's their problem.

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I could however use Spotify. The reason is mainly due to TCP/UDP interaction - TCP reduces its used bandwidth when packetloss occurs, whereas UDP just goes for it full blast. When UDP traffic is heavy (streaming, XBL, VOIP), TCP traffic (web, email) can become quite bogged down. Decent QOS should stop this happening, but most Unis will just block most UDP traffic.

There are also other issues that can affect, on the UoG residential network, all computers connecting have to perform 802.1x NAC otherwise you don't get anything happening over the connection (port based). As a result, the device needs an operating system that can support this kind of authentication (linked to student MLE for logins), such as XP, Vista, 7, OS X etc. Xbox 360s can't do it.

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is there a reason for this tyranny? why can't the dorms allow Xbox Live? if a kid wants to stay up all night gaming then fail finals it's their problem.

Normally I'd agree but dorms will have limited bandwidth so it makes it easier for them to just block it. All the students PS3's/Xbox's connecting would quickly overwhelm it.

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One of my other friends said she couldn't even use Firefox, only IE!!!

Maybe you could have Xbox LAN parties over the Uni network, that'd be okay maybe?

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Normally I'd agree but dorms will have limited bandwidth so it makes it easier for them to just block it. All the students PS3's/Xbox's connecting would quickly overwhelm it.

Here in Madison they used to have bandwidth limits - it was 5GB in a rolling week my first year, then 10 my second, then they just went unlimited my 3rd. If you went over your limit multiple times they just decreased your download speed to about dial-up speed :p

As far as consoles, we just had to register them (you needed its MAC address) with our ResNet services and then you could play online all you wanted.

-Spenser

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My uni mates staying in halls this year have to pay ?5 a week to get the port blocks removed, if you don?t pay everything apart from port 80 and 443 gets blocked.

It will depend on where your staying, in the halls where a friend stayed last year he just had to phone up and get the 360?s mac address put on an allow list. There?s a few different halls around here which have different policies.

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Ask on 'The Student Room' which should have a York Uni sub-forum.

Your probally going to have to share the internet connection using your laptop. As most universities(if they even unblock ports) will have another method of security on the connection, ie VPN or IEEE 802.1x.

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I managed to get Xbox Live working fine.

If the system works on mac addresses... you can infact set your own mac address on the Xbox - so set it to your computers!

I used to have to log in to the internet first, so I would with my laptop. Then, as soon as I'd logged in, I'd unplug that ethernet cable and plug in my xbox (with the mac set as my computers one) and it worked!

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The OP's from England, i don't think this is as big an issue in the land of the free. Makes you think back to Valley Forge and all.

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I'll second that keeping everything open causes major slow downs.

I'm not in the dorms anymore, but with people gaming and also having massive movie/music servers (via Samba) the internet speed really went to hell every night. I usually had to wait until the weekends to catch up on anything I wanted to dl.

On the weekends I could get about 2-3MBp/s for a download, but during the week it would slump down to about 50-100KBp/s. That's the sole reason I moved the hell out of there and got an apartment.

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Can you not just pay for internet access from a provider?

Everyone you're sharing with chip in?

Or do they not allow you to do that?

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I'm not sure if you can pay for your own Provider, I probably wouldn't want to pay extra anyway since I'm gonna be in a hella load of debt.

If I can't I can't. T'would just be nice if I could.

Spotify, I do really want that to work a lot, being a poor student and all free music is essential!

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As no doubt you can tell by the replies, it totally depends on where you are.

At bath, nothing was blocked. XBL, spotify etc worked fine.

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