Be Excellent To Each Other

My brother's 360 is connected to my wireless router, er, wirelessly. My 360 is connected via a cable. We've never previously had any problems (it has been set up like this for a year now), but we've been having some recently.

Well, when I say we've never had problems - I haven't had problems, he has trouble finding Gears of War games and gets signed out all of the time or something. But who gives a fuck? I pay for the interweb. Anyway, over the last week I've been getting kicked off Live when he signs in, and no matter what I do, it won't let me sign back in until I've done a "connection test" and verified that I'm still connected to the net. This works every time, but is very fucking annoying mid-game.

I've no idea why this has magically started happening, and my brother has denied until blue that he hasn't fucked with my router settings, so what the hell is going on? I admit, my wireless router is shit and old and probably overloaded, so basically, can this be rectified, or should I get a newer router? And which one?

I want one that supports two 360s at the same time, and three PCs surfing the web. I don't want one that says on the box that it'll do this or will probably do this, I'd like one that someone has regularly used with loads of stuff accessing the net off it. Anyone got a similar set up and a router to recommend?

Thank you!

I had a similar problem where me logging on to the 360 logged off the internet connection of my missus, and sometimes vice versa. Turned out that I was assigning my IP on the XBox to whatever number it fancied, and so was she. It then decided to take the same one sometimes. Maybe if you assign them both specifically different ones it might work?

Or you could wait for an answer from someone who knows what they're talking about.

Yeah, that could be a problem, however I've given both 360s static IP addresses.

UNLESS, that is what the fucker has changed on his 360 to make this start happening...

Couldn't you just password protect the router so he can't fiddle with it?

Or kick his 360 until it breaks?

Yes, but that doesn't fix the problem. I don't know what he has changed or if he has changed anything.

My guess is the router (and they can do this automatically) is switching the port forwardings between the 2 xboxs automatically.

Xbox Live can work without forwarded ports but you won't be able to host (the NAT status thing in the test). I assume previously the fowarding was sticking with one and now it's getting switched, you should be able to force it to not forward to one of them in the router settings.

Sorry about vagueness, can't remember most of the terms.

It was definitely the port forwarding. Unfortunately the magic port (3070), I think, was causing the problems. I had it open for the IP address for my own 360, but for some reason it was letting my brother on and not me. Anyway, long story short, I've completely disabled my router's firewall. Fuck it. I had my modem plugged directly in with no firewall for years with no problems, and it's working a treat now!

Heh, in short (and again this will be vague) some routers can detect what ports need to be forwarded and will just listen to a device asking for them. If both 360s keep asking they'll be fighting each other, which could well have been inadvertently started somehow.

It's called something clever.

It's uPnP, isn't it?

Yeah, ask the guy who doesn't know, I just remember letting it do it to get my 360 working

Can someone come over and do mine for me, then, please?