FFXI / ISP Incompatibility Shuts Users Out 42
A user writes "Since Tuesday 9/28, an incompatibility between how Final Fantasy XI addresses a network connection with it's Playonline Viewer and Optimum Online's broadband service has blocked well over 1000 players out of the game. The only thing both companies do agree on is that the problem is a minor one. Numerous players have been told by Optimum Online that it is not a priority. Likewise Square Enix has no notice of the problem on their website, but an option on their call menu tells players they are aware of the problem and it is being worked on before hanging up.
At least it's only a minor problem . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
After all, it's not like it'll affect anything important. You know, like the bottom line.
--AC
Re:At least it's only a minor problem . . . (Score:1)
Re:At least it's only a minor problem . . . (Score:2, Insightful)
Stated another way : corps of the size we're talking about here could not care less about this problem beacause it affects so few people.
Re:At least it's only a minor problem . . . (Score:1)
Definitely agree with your sarcasm, though.
I've solved it, Watson (Score:1, Informative)
There is no chance that I could care less about this story. But it seems like a lot of people are clueless.
1. PlayOnline is thoroughly st
Re:I've solved it, Watson (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, but it doesn't. I run on Comcast, so I was curious what might be causing the problem so I decided to run a packet sniffer and watch the game connect. It opened something on Port 5000 or so and did a bunch of miscellaneous stuff, including a bunch of HTTP transactions on non-standard ports. (I think - I need to recheck those logs and make sure it wasn't redirected to that port.) But it never touched Port 25.
This misunderstanding comes because if you read the "required open ports" you'll see them list Ports 25, 80, 110, and 443. A quick overview will see those listed as SMTP, HTTP, POP3, and HTTPS.
As it turns out, the PlayOnline client does include an e-mail client, to allow you to send and receive e-mail via an e-mail account that comes with the service. If you wish to send e-mail using that account, then port 25 comes into play.
It turns out that PlayOnline uses a bunch of Internet standards to run, including HTTP for downloading the menu pages and XML to describe those pages. HTTPS appears to be used for when you sign up for your account and various other features.
(You can actually view the SSL certificate when you enter a secured portion of the service. A "key" icon gets added to the Navigation mini-menu. Square-Enix also digitally signs all e-mail they send to their customers, and the e-mail client they use supports that, as well.)
My personal guess is that OO created a transparent HTTP proxy, and that's what's messing things up. A lot of the basic functionality in PlayOnline is actually done of HTTP/HTTPS.
Re:I've solved it, Watson (Score:1)
Re:I've solved it, Watson (Score:1)
Don't you mean filtering? Proxying and firewalling are two different things.
I know that OO does not use a transparent proxy server because they say so in the TOS. You could also verify that rather simply by looking at the traffic generated by a host (such as me.) This isn't happening.
Re:Port 25?!? (Score:2, Informative)
As it turns out, the PlayOnline viewer actually runs over HTTP and HTTPS. The Final Fantasy XI portion of the game runs over ports 50000+.
Bottom line, whatever the problem is, Port 25 isn't it.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Port 25?!? (Score:1)
Re:Port 25?!? (Score:1, Troll)
PlayOnline Viewer uses port 25 for its Friends List and won't let the user in until it fully connects. End result : PlayOnline Viewer cannot 100% connect a
Re:Port 25?!? (Score:4, Informative)
I can't figure out what you're talking about, the Friends List is loaded over HTTP (or maybe HTTPS, I can't remember, I'll have to check when I get home).
Pretty much all of the PlayOnline Viewer related stuff occurs over either HTTP or HTTPS. It then gets handed off to a DLL when it connects to FFXI. (The new delay when it loads the main menu is caused because it now loads the main menu as a kind of XML "screen" file off the POL servers.)
I've watched it connect while running Ethereal, there's no port 25 stuff at all. As others have said, the Optimum Online port 25 block went into effect about a month ago.
Re:Port 25?!? (Score:2)
In fact, when I sent myself an e-mail, it connected on a port in the 3000 range. No port 25 in the mix anywhere.
Stop the Hate (Score:1, Funny)
BC
Re:Stop the Hate (Score:1)
Re:Stop the Hate (Score:1)
Re:Stop the Hate (Score:1)
Derp (Score:1)
Re:Derp (Score:1)
Of course it's a problem (Score:1)
Re:Of course it's a problem (Score:2, Informative)
I might also add that PCs are part of this mix. That is, this isn't PS2 only network. FFXI allows PC and PS2 players to mingle.
-M
They've always had a buggy networking layer (Score:5, Informative)
I started playing Final Fantasy XI online for PC this weekend.
(Yep, had to boot into windows for first time in long time
and had a couple crashes to remind me why I stopped using it)
Anyway, I have a linux box as my firewall doing NAT and the game
would not work with the error:
FFXI:3100 Could not connect to lobby server
Tech support just told me it's my fault for using a linux firewall
and implied their system has no bugs and claimed it works with NAT.
After some packet sniffing, I discovered that some bug in the game's
network code was causing it to send packets to the external ip of
my firewall(port 54001) instead of to square enix's lobby server.
A web search of port 54001 came up with a japanese language page
which had some iptables rules to use to let FF online work from
a playstation through a firewall. Those did not work, but the page
also had a list of Square's servers and which ports they use so
I made some quick rules to forward any misdirected packets to those
listed servers and voila it all worked.
So, in case anyone happens to have problems with this bug in
PlayOnline and Final Fantasy XI not working through NAT on
an adsl connection, here is the solution.
Here are the relevant parts of my firewall script:
extint="eth0"
extip=`ifconfig eth0|grep 'inet addr'|cut -f2 -d:|cut -f1 -d" "`
intint="eth1"
intnet="192.168.1.0/24"
iptab
iptables -I PREROUTING -t nat -p tcp -s $intnet -d $extip --dport 51240 -j DNAT --to 61.195.48.236:51240
iptables -I PREROUTING -t nat -p tcp -s $intnet -d $extip --dport 51300 -j DNAT --to 61.195.48.238:51300
iptables -I PREROUTING -t nat -p tcp -s $intnet -d $extip --dport 51301 -j DNAT --to 61.195.48.239:51301
iptables -I PREROUTING -t nat -p tcp -s $intnet -d $extip --dport 54000 -j DNAT --to 61.195.48.239:54000
iptables -I PREROUTING -t nat -p tcp -s $intnet -d $extip --dport 54001 -j DNAT --to 61.195.48.209:54001
iptables -I PREROUTING -t nat -p tcp -s $intnet -d $extip --dport 54002 -j DNAT --to 61.195.62.141:54002
iptables -I PREROUTING -t nat -p udp -s $intnet -d $extip --dport 54120 -j DNAT --to 61.195.62.144:54120
iptables -I PREROUTING -t nat -p udp -s $intnet -d $extip --dport 54246 -j DNAT --to 61.195.62.158:54246
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Squeenix == Evil (Score:1)
It's For Your Own Good...Really. (Score:1)
On the other hand, I'm forced to consider that the spin on this particular "feature" might be that it's not an outage, it's a one-step recovery program for MMORPG addicts. Were I on their tech support staff, I'd be tempted to try it at least once.
Using ports 53 (DNS), 443 (SSL), and 4000-52000 (Score:1)
Re:Using ports 53 (DNS), 443 (SSL), and 4000-52000 (Score:2)
If you look at the your packet dump, you'll note that most of the POL stuff occurs over HTTP. (Find the random port it used, and tell Ethereal to decode it as HTTP.)
The HTTP server on the other end identifies it as Apache, version 1.3.26.
Apparently PlayOnline uses open source software. :)
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)