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Network Hub Vs Switch


xicat487
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I'm quite literally just stopping the hosting, unplugging power and ethernets from the switch. Plugging in power and ethernets to the new switch. Then starting hosting. Then the second xbox sees it. I've joined on a few. Enter the game. Kill the other player. IGR on both xbox's. Fire up brute force and test again. 

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12 minutes ago, xicat487 said:

Of the xboxes you used do any of them have XBMC or a softmod on them ? If so what BIOS ?

I don't softmod. Never have. They all have xbmc.... but that doesn't matter. Once you load a game, the dashboard is completely flushed from memory as well as any settings it set such as IP address, etc. 

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3 minutes ago, xicat487 said:

Man WTF I don't get it I must be mental, I will keep tinkering with it. Thank you again for your time and effort. If I get it sorted an update will be posted. 

Any time my friend. Good luck with your troubleshooting. I will say though, if one xbox is not receiving an IP address, that proves you have something wrong on that link. If you know dhcp is set up and working, you could have a bad switch port, bad cable, or bad nic in the xbox. 
Check to make sure you have link lights near the NIC on the back of the xbox. 

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9 hours ago, xicat487 said:

Man WTF I don't get it I must be mental, I will keep tinkering with it. Thank you again for your time and effort. If I get it sorted an update will be posted. 

Just to verify it would work I set up an xbox in various rooms and various network drops on various switches. Here is the result. 

BruteForceSystemLink.jpg

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I don't give up easily, but damn this is some crap.   All other Games work perfect on every network configuration I setup. Run this on the known good link and it tells me FU man.

hub, switch, direct router connections, new cables  no results

Trendnet TEG-S5G v2.0R direct connections = fail 

Linksys NH1005 direct connections =fail

Asus RT AC86U direct connections =fail

All modded boxes = fail / dashboard shows IP address and functional DHCP set

Run form DVD = fail

Run from HDD= fail

Stock boxes = OK

IDK Maybe the xbox names has something to do with it 

Is the game looking for the MS dashbord DHCP setting / I do not have It installed 

Can you recommend a switch that shows the network port connections to see what happening ?  

I Would like an 8 port switch to bring on the go as I provide all the systems for setups.

You mentioned XBMC what version  I'm questioning my HDD setups now.

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I have made some progress, but still in the weeds.

The systems now see the link but errors out as the host denied the request to join.

This was done with a stock v1.6 and a v1.2 Xecuter 3 switched off running from a stock TSOP on 2 DVDs

My thoughts on the issue is maybe this game checks the NIC settings from the stored dashboard file on C :

You mentioned it flushes the dash settings on game initialization. 

What process did you use to setup your XBMC systems that you pictured working.

Hexan Slayers SID something else ?

 

 

 

Denied.jpg

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7 hours ago, xicat487 said:

I am unsure if this is true if a crossover cable is used ? 

yeah it's true no matter what. That's how the xbox works. The underlying operating system is loaded from the bios, but the shell or interface you deal with is whatever xbe is currently loaded. The previous one is completely flushed from memory so nothing you've changed will have any effect. The only exception is modifying the eeprom, etc. Any IP address you set though, is totally gone when you load up a game. It will request its own if it's Xbox Live aware. If it's using system link, it is not using the ip addresses you set. You can verify this yourself by pinging the ip address you set in your dashboard. Load up a non Xbox Live xbe and watch your ping disappear. 

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8 hours ago, xicat487 said:

I am unsure if this is true if a crossover cable is used ? 

Basically every xbox once in system link mode changes its IP to 0.0.0.1 and begins listening for broadcasts. 
Once an Xbox is hosting a game, it begins sending those broadcasts. 
The other consoles see this broadcast from the host and do not change their ip. So this means that every Xbox on the lan has an ip conflict. Is that a problem? Not for system link. Why? Only a device that is looking at the IP addresses and trying to associate them with the proper mac address will be confused. Layer 2 switches (unmanaged) don't know or care about IP addresses. (Layer 3 are aware of ip addresses but an ip conflict is not a deal-breaker to them at all. They really just need to be managed via ip so therefore they are aware of ip's. They are still switches and still really only care about layer 2.) Your router would obviously but since system link traffic isn't supposed to go across the internet, your router won't see it. System link would need to have a default gateway set and of course it does not. The Xbox's expect traffic sent this way so they aren't confused. So it works just fine.
Inside of that broadcast packet was the game server name and mac address. The other Xbox's begin communicating with that Xbox via its mac address. (It does send traffic from 0.0.0.1 to 0.0.0.1 and that traffic does not come to itself. I believe this is because they wanted to use some encryption of the system link traffic and that needed to take place at layer 3... but they needed to make this work without configuration from the end user who won't know how to set ip addresses. So even though it uses the same ip address, the mac address allows the traffic to flow from 1 xbox to another on UDP port 3074.)
This is why you cannot use a layer 3 tunnel for system link. It must use a layer 2 tunnel or l2tp to make it work. 

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1 hour ago, OGXbox Admin said:

Basically every xbox once in system link mode changes its IP to 0.0.0.1 and begins listening for broadcasts. So this means that every Xbox on the lan has an ip conflict. Is that a problem? Not for system link. Why? Only a device that is looking at the IP addresses and trying to associate them with the proper mac address will be confused. Layer 2 switches (unmanaged) don't know or care about IP addresses. (Layer 3 are aware of ip addresses but an ip conflict is not a deal-breaker to them at all. They really just need to be managed via ip so therefore they are aware of ip's. They are still switches and still really only care about layer 2.)

I am no network specialist like yourself , but on post #36 can explain what the issue is with the auto kick ? This was setup with a managed switch in DHCP .

 

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1 hour ago, xicat487 said:

I am no network specialist like yourself , but on post #36 can explain what the issue is with the auto kick ? This was setup with a managed switch in DHCP .

 

That looks like a version mismatch to me. You might want to copy off the game's save folders from E: drive. Tdata and Udata hold that information. You'll have to find which one is correct from google. Then when you've cleared it from there, you will be loading the exact same version from disk and you won't get denied anymore. 

Edit: I'd also clear the e:\cache directory plus anything contained on x, y, and z to be sure. 

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All of the DVDs were verified on 3 stock units with no issue with system link.

11 minutes ago, OGXbox Admin said:

That looks like a version mismatch to me.

I want to start fresh with a new HDD setup mirroring your setup.

Can you give me the quick rundown your personal setup ?

What version XBMC

What installer was used to make the HDD 

What BIOS

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2 hours ago, xicat487 said:

All of the DVDs were verified on 3 stock units with no issue with system link.

I want to start fresh with a new HDD setup mirroring your setup.

Can you give me the quick rundown your personal setup ?

What version XBMC

What installer was used to make the HDD 

What BIOS

None of that matters even a little bit. Please follow the steps I just gave you and report back. 

Edit: The main purpose of this site is to assist future users that may come across the thread and information. 
So if we just wipe out your hdd and rebuild it... it will probably work but we won't know SPECIFICALLY what it was and what it would take to fix it. 

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13 hours ago, OGXbox Admin said:

The main purpose of this site is to assist future users that may come across the thread and information. 
So if we just wipe out your hdd and rebuild it... it will probably work but we won't know SPECIFICALLY what it was and what it would take to fix it. 

We can put this one down as solved, this is the rundown.

On the stock v1.6 Saved the UDATA to a memory card and deleted the game files from the HDD

On the Xecuter Saved the UDATA and TDATA and deleted them. Deleted the Game rip from the HDD. Cleared the cache.

Installed the Game with DVD2XBOX.

Ran the disc on v1.6 and the image from the Xecuter.

On a network switch /managed and unmanaged/ the host denied the request to join. 

On a network hub  the host denied the request to join.

 

Through FTP I put a stock Xbox 5659.03 dashboard on C :

I ran setup as mentioned above with the results below.

On a network switch /managed and unmanaged/ the host denied the request to join.  

On a network hub  the system link was established with no issue.

Its weird but it worked.

 

The disc part number is 0303 X09-45908 located next to the Microsoft Game Studios logo

Thank you again for your phenomenal patience and extensive knowledge on the topic.

If you want the UDATA or TDATA I can attach them.  

 

 

 

 

 

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6 hours ago, xicat487 said:

We can put this one down as solved, this is the rundown.

On the stock v1.6 Saved the UDATA to a memory card and deleted the game files from the HDD

On the Xecuter Saved the UDATA and TDATA and deleted them. Deleted the Game rip from the HDD. Cleared the cache.

Installed the Game with DVD2XBOX.

Ran the disc on v1.6 and the image from the Xecuter.

On a network switch /managed and unmanaged/ the host denied the request to join. 

On a network hub  the host denied the request to join.

 

Through FTP I put a stock Xbox 5659.03 dashboard on C :

I ran setup as mentioned above with the results below.

On a network switch /managed and unmanaged/ the host denied the request to join.  

On a network hub  the system link was established with no issue.

Its weird but it worked.

 

The disc part number is 0303 X09-45908 located next to the Microsoft Game Studios logo

Thank you again for your phenomenal patience and extensive knowledge on the topic.

If you want the UDATA or TDATA I can attach them.  

 

 

 

 

 

It is confusing why this worked when a hub was used. The only difference between a hub and a switch is a hub broadcasts all packets to all ports always and a switch will only broadcast until it locates the port with the other devices on it. Once the port the mac address of the device you are trying to communicate with known, packets intended for that device will only be forwarded to that port. If you only have two hosts on a network hub, everything will be fine. If you have 8 hosts on a hub you will see plenty of latency due to collisions where packets need to resent multiple times to reach the destination host. The host does not have any idea whether it is connected to a hub, switch, router, or directly with a crossover cable. The bottom line is short of a managed switch with some type of access control list applied, the network equipment should have no bearing on anything so long as you are sure everything on layer 1 (physical - nic, port, and cabling) is good.

As someone early in the thread mentioned, I would be interested to see a Wireshark packet capture of you attempting a connection with both the failing setup and the setup that finally worked.

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1 hour ago, VCoupe376ci said:

As someone early in the thread mentioned, I would be interested to see a Wireshark packet capture of you attempting a connection with both the failing setup and the setup that finally worked.

 I have no idea what to do if I attempted that.  I do remember this problem back in 2005 at a LAN party with this game. The Radica Gamester LAN Party HUB had a switch on the rear, once it was set to 5 port hub it was ok. Set in uplink the system link failed. Yeah I agree it makes no sense why a switch does not work.

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On 8/21/2020 at 7:46 AM, xicat487 said:

 I have no idea what to do if I attempted that.  I do remember this problem back in 2005 at a LAN party with this game. The Radica Gamester LAN Party HUB had a switch on the rear, once it was set to 5 port hub it was ok. Set in uplink the system link failed. Yeah I agree it makes no sense why a switch does not work.

that one actually kind of makes sense because the "uplink" ports are specifically to connect one switch to another. They behave differently than normal switch ports. In some cases you can get away with it because some modern switches don't treat them that differently.... but some older switches would not and it would really mess up the network traffic. 
Also, if you are plugged into a "console" port on the switch that isn't ethernet. I think it would be good to see your network setup / switch. This is a mystery I really want to solve. 

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  • 1 year later...
On 8/21/2020 at 7:06 AM, OGXbox Admin said:

that one actually kind of makes sense because the "uplink" ports are specifically to connect one switch to another. They behave differently than normal switch ports. In some cases you can get away with it because some modern switches don't treat them that differently.... but some older switches would not and it would really mess up the network traffic. 
Also, if you are plugged into a "console" port on the switch that isn't ethernet. I think it would be good to see your network setup / switch. This is a mystery I really want to solve. 

Network switches only allow traffic to their connected device's MAC address.  All other traffic is filter out.  System Link may rely on all devices seeing all network traffic to establish a session.

 

A hub does not filter network traffic.  All ports receive data packets sent from all other port attached devices.

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6 hours ago, KaosEngineer said:

Network switches only allow traffic to their connected device's MAC address.  All other traffic is filter out.  System Link may rely on all devices seeing all network traffic to establish a session.

 

A hub does not filter network traffic.  All ports receive data packets sent from all other port attached devices.

The xbox functions just fine connected to a switch. System Link functions at Layer 2. Even though it will give 0.0.0.1 and 0.0.0.2 ip's to the devices, this doesn't really matter. Broadcasts go out through a switch just fine. 

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