Xbox Live Linux

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Xbox Live Linux

Introduction
This is a common setup for Xbox users. You have a computer, TV and Xbox in one room, and a wireless router on the other side of the home. A logical option, besides buying an Xbox wireless adapter, is to connect your xbox to a PC that is connected to that router. In my opinion, is just as easy to get this working in Linux as it is in Windows.
Assumptions
1. You have a WLAN card and a regular LAN card installed
2. Both have working drivers installed
3. You can connect to the router with the wireless card and access the internet without problems
4. You have a crossover cable
5. Your WLAN interface is wlan0, and LAN is eth0
5. iptables is installed
The guide
1. Configure eth0
First, assign an IP address to the eth0 interface, which is the card that is connected to the Xbox via a crossover cable. Be sure to 'su' to root before continuing.
These two commands should have assigned an ip address to eth0. Verify this with
The ip address assigned should be a network that is not in use on your network. If your router address is 192.168.2.1 use something besides 2.1.. 0.1, 1.1, etc.
2. Enable forwarding
The next step is enabling IP forwarding. Check to see if forwarding is enabled:
If the output is 1, you are good. If its 0, then run this command:
3. Configure iptables
With iptables, you can forward all of the traffic from eth0 to your wireless card wlan0:
You may have to replace 192.168.2.0 with whatever your network was from step 1. If you used 192.168.1.1 as the IP, then use 192.168.1.0 with the iptables command.
4. Configure the Xbox
Go into the dashboard and then go to network settings. Then select IP Address and set the configuration type to manual. Here are the settings if you configured your eth0 as 192.168.2.1:
IP Address: 192.168.2.2
Subnet mask: 255.255.255.0
Gateway: 192.168.2.1
Go back a screen and go to DNS Servers. Set the primary DNS server to your router's IP address. Now, go back to the network settings screen and go to Connect. You should now be connected to Xbox live.
5. Making it permanent
If you restart your computer, you will lose all of these settings. So find the custom startup script for whatever distro you are using (for slackware, open the file /etc/rc.d/rc.local) and add this text to the file:
You should be good to go next restart.

A little bit of background first. I've been a subscriber to XBox Live! since its launch in November of 2002. For a while, I was on DSL (at my old apartment), and had a nice static IP dedicated solely to the XBox. Later, I bought a house and could no longer get DSL, so I switched to cable. No more nice static IPs, but I paid for a second dynamic IP and strung a looooong ethernet cable across my entire house and hooked up the XBox that way. In both of these cases, life was good. Of course, I couldn't just leave well enough alone. I was annoyed by the long ethernet cable, and Microsoft had just shipped the XBox Wireless Adapter, so I bought it. Now, a bit of background on my wireless setup: I use a Linux machine to do Network Address Translation (NAT) for my internal network (a wired desktop, a wireless laptop, a wireless TiVO, and now a wireless XBox). I've used a similar setup since college, oh so many years ago (I believe the first time I set this up was 1998). Anyway, back to the story. I plugged in the XBox wireless adapter, set it up, and things worked great. The XBox could connect to Live!, and I could play games. Then I noticed that there were some games I couldn't connect to. I lived with it, because there was usually an abundance of games to choose from (btw, my poison of choice is Project Gotham Racing 2 (PGR2)). Now that the game has been out for more than a year, the number of available online games or 'rooms' has dwindled, and the 'This session is no longer available' message is much more annoying. When there are only four or five available games in the list, and I can only connect to one of those if I'm lucky, my gaming time is spent more on searching for games than actually playing.
Description: This application allows a user to display their Xbox Live Gamercard on their KDE4.x desktop. It displays the user's Gamertag (to a gold background for Gold members and a silver background for Silver members), reputation, gamerscore and zone. It also displays icons of the 5 most recently played games on that account. You have a computer, TV and Xbox in one room, and a wireless router on the other side of the home. A logical option, besides buying an Xbox wireless adapter, is to connect your xbox to a PC that is connected to that router. In my opinion, is just as easy to get this working in Linux as it is in Windows.
Well, I finally decided to do something about it. I was told to check out this page to help diagnose my problem. The key metric here was the 'NT' value, or NAT Type. My XBox reported that value as 1, or 'open', which means I shouldn't have any problems connecting to online games. And yet, I was. The description of NAT Type 1 is as follows, and gave me my first clue:
Open NAT means that either the port assignment policy is minimal or the router has a fully compliant version of UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) enabled by default.'Ah ha!' I thought. UPNP is where to start. I knew for a fact that my Linux NAT server didn't support UPNP, so that was a very good first lead. A bit of time on Google gave me the SourceForge site for the Linux UPnP Internet Gateway Device (linux-igd) project. My first instinct was to see if it was available already in Debian, but of course it wasn't. Adobe reader 10 1 8. So, time to grab the source. As I read the README, I was pointed to the Linux SDK for UPnP Devices (libupnp) page as a requirement for building linux-igd. Not a problem, so I check Debian's package list again with no luck, and download the source for 1.2.1.
Xbox One X LinuxBuilding and installing the source went smoothly, so I switched over to the linux-igd code and started building. Holy crap, there were a lot of errors! After a half hour of investigation (or, 'investigation', meaning, 'hair-pulling, cursing at my PC, and just general frustration'), I realized that linux-igd is pretty old (the latest tarball was Jan 12, 2003), while libupnp was a little newer (latest tarball Feb 13, 2003). I grabbed an older version of libupnp (or upnpsdk, as the 1.0 version was called), removed the 1.2.1 version, and built and installed the 1.0.4 version.
Okay, now back to linux-igd. With upnpsdk 1.0.4 in place, linux-igd built like a champ. I installed the binaries, added the necessary route (route add -net 239.0.0.0 netmask 255.0.0.0 internalInterface), ran the daemon (upnpd externalInterfaceinternalInterface), and started tailing the syslog debug log (/var/log/debug in my case, but where you've told syslogd to log debug messages).
Xbox Install LinuxTime to fire up the XBox. I turned it on, put PGR2 in the tray, and loaded up the game. Select screenshot windows. While the XBox was starting, I noticed a request to the UPnP daemon for a port mapping. This is starting to look good. I connected to Live! in the game, went to Optimatch, and did my standard search ('Kudos racing, selection limited to class of cars', because I like competition and it's better when everyone is forced to choose cars of similar capabilities). Seven or eight games showed up the list, and I picked one at random. Previously, I would've gotten an error saying 'The session is no longer available' (well, okay, that only happened about 75-80% of the time). Tonight, the first game I chose allowed me right in. Thinking to myself that it must've been a fluke, I left the lobby and tried a different game. It worked. I did that another four or five times, and aside from trying to join one game with 7 out of 8 people in the lobby and having it fill up on me right as I tried to join, every game worked.
Xbox Live Linux Download

Xbox 360 Linux DownloadThe moral of the story is that an 'open' NAT as the XBox Dashboard reports it may not actually be an 'open' NAT, if you don't have UPnP support. It seems that XBox Live! really relies on UPnP when running in a NAT configuration, so you need to provide that support if you want a smooth experience. The easiest route is to just buy one of the many commerciallyavailablerouters that are now available at very reasonable prices, but I don't always like 'easy'. Now that my Linux box has UPnP support, I have the best of both worlds: Complete control over my network configuration and firewall, and rock-solid XBox Live! support. And best of all, it didn't cost me a thing since I already had everything I needed in place already.