So yesterday I went to a friends to play Halo 3, play Halo3, eat curry and oh yeah.. Get destroyed at Halo 3. Luckily for my ego and really unfortunately for him, his 360 started with the red ring problem before i was defeated too badly. I really feel for you mate!
Anyway, lets add insult to injury. His new house sucks. Simply, it has TPON so he can’t get broadband. No Xbox live! It isn’t even in a cable area. So to ease his pain, I figured out how to plumb his desktops 3G/HSDPA to the 360, only for the DVD drive to die within an hour…
How to recreate this? We only had a single patch cable (no crossover for 360 to PC, and quite a large cable was needed). The 360 had wireless, his PC did not. He had a router from when he applied for broandbad. We picked it up from his parents and plumbed it up so that the connection was like so:
- My laptop / Xbox 360
- Wifi
- Netgear DG834G
- Ethernet
- Dell Windows XP Desktop
- 3 USB Modem
I found that the 360 will work on a network with Microsoft ICS. Unfortunately the information on that is insanely limited. Or perhaps there is too much non-geek whitenoise: You can find out how to set it up in conventional situations, but not how it actually works. Which makes unusual setups challenging. The internet suggested the ICS host needed to be on 192.168.0.1 and that it either acted as a DHCP server or used zeroconf addresses. So I duly turned off DHCP on the router, moved it to 192.168.0.2 and made the PC 192.168.0.1.
So now I booted my Linux laptop and did some ping testing. I had a zeroconf address and could ping the PC and the router. Pinging google, however, failed on DNS resolution. I checked my resolv.conf and it had chosen the PC as the gateway and had a reference to “mshome.net”. So I was happy the setup was working “theoretically”, and that ZoneAlarm was at fault. Sure enough, down the firewall and it worked just fine. Gah.
ICS mode in ZoneAlarm got DNS working, but the connection still seems blocked. No idea how to fix that 
If you are insane and down the firewall.. Both the 360 and Wii happily venture online! Yay..
