pixelpost installation complete
I’ve been evaluating a few different galleries to use for my personal photo collections, coppermine and gallery2 seemed to be the best suited until I came across pixelpost. I’ve finished the initial installation and threw in a third-party theme template. NextGen is another good choice that I will continue to review, at this point it will really come down to whichever is easiest to process and upload images into.
You can check the gallery out here: http://photos.bunker51.com
Xbox Live & Router Tweaking
Most routers available today have a sufficient default configuration for Xbox Live traffic to route properly. I was able to pretty much plug & play my 360 to my router until recently when trying to play CoD5 - which appears to be pretty picky about its traffic if you plan to play online. I know there are more games that are just as demanding (if not more), but I don’t consider myself a hardcore player so it took a while to discover this little issue.
In this post I’ll cover a two part ’surefire’ solution to get you running full force. This assumes of course that you have access to your router and have enough knowledge to navigate through its features. The outline below is based on a Linksys WRT54GX-v2, but the terminology will be similiar across brands. This article also assumes your Xbox is currently set up with a Static IP address, for reference, mine is currently set at 192.168.1.68.
Our first step is to configure Port Forwarding on the router to send appropriate traffic to and from the Xbox. Microsoft requires that the following ports be available for Xbox Live:
Check out the following KB Article for more port details: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/908874
If your router is capable, you can set rules for those ports specifically. If you do not want to mess around with the individual ports, you can open it up to all ports (1-65535). Be aware that this can cause extra overhead on your router and network, but it is the configuration I have gone with and as of yet has not given me any issues. When you are finished, your configuration should look much like mine:
At this point I encourage you to apply the settings to the router and restart it, run the Xbox network diagnostics again and see if you still get the nasty ‘NAT settings too strict’ prompt. If you don’t, you should be good to go! However, if it still comes up, we’re going to throw the Xbox into the DMZ as well.
Putting any device in the DMZ exclusively is not recommended, as you lose a major layer of protection. For the sake of an Xbox, there’s not much harm that can be done (yet) by having it open to the world. This can put you in a tight spot if you ever need to put another device in the DMZ, as most routers only allow for one device to be DMZ bound at a time.
- DMZ Configuration for Xbox Live
Call of Duty 5 World at War multiplayer blues
After a short marathon and only consuming four RedBull’s, CoD5 singleplayer mode proved to be quite fun. I couldn’t wait to load up multiplayer and get in on the Live action! Unfortunately, I was quick to run into my first dissapointment - It requires Xbox Live Gold membership, looks like my cheap ass wasn’t going to get by on Silver any longer! I figured it’s probably worth paying for a quick month just to check it out, so I was off to bootcamp to see how rusty i’ve gotten…
I joined into the first game relatively quick, just in time to see the end game scoreboard and drop back to the lobby. From there i’m promptly greeted with a disconnected from host message. Great! I’ll just try to join up another one, or maybe not… I ran into an issue where the game would cycle between ‘getting match quality’ and ’searching for available games..’ I gave it 15 minutes before I got impatient and gave the xbox a cold boot to try again, but I was still faced with the same issue. I decided to jump on the computer for a bit while I waited for it to find me a match, it shouldn’t take too long seeing as there are 250,000+ active players online! 35 minutes later I finally get into a match, but only to have 2 yellow bars for latency and to get kicked after the round ended.
At this point, I’m getting a little irritated. I couldn’t think of blaming the game for my problems, though this is the first time I’ve seen any type of connection issues with the Xbox. Digging a little deeper, I was able to discover the root cause - My NAT settings were too strict for the Xbox.
I put some good effort into tweaking my router to accomodate the desired Xbox settings, gave everything one last power cycle, and launched the game to try again. This time, the search would place me almost immediately into a game, and my latency was back were I expected it to be. On top of that, I found I actually hadn’t lost my FPS touch and could still hang at the top of the scoreboard =].
I’m writing this in hopes that my discovery will be useful to other players that suffer from the same endless cycle that I ran into. If you still can not connect after verifying your router settings and getting green results from the network diagnostics, then I would start looking at your internet connection and be sure to power cycle your cable or dsl modem!
Bunker51 - Reborn
I’ve had this domain on hold for quite a few years now, I used to utilize it to track my computer projects and case modifications.
I decided to combine webhosting for a couple other sites and throw bunker51 back into the mix - the theory for this site will stay the same, stay tuned for my current projects and thoughts!