For months my Xbox 360 has been complaining about the MTU being too small on my Internet gateway. This meant no updates and Xbox Live stopped working. I’ve been busy so I did not give it much thought.
My brother Alek bought a new one for his apartment and hooked it up at my house. I figured that the MTU problem was an issue with my old Xbox 360. Naturally it wasn’t. His had the same problem so I looked at my Linux gateway. Running ifconfig on my server showed me that the MTU on the external interface was set to 576.
How did that happen? I thought it defaulted to 1500. I ran the command “ifconfig eth1 mtu 1500” and that fixed the problem right away. On my openSUSE server I edited the file /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-eth1 and made the MTU line read MTU=’1500′. This way when my box reboots the MTU setting should go to 1500.
After that was done, Alek was able to download the “new Xbox Experience”. The irony is that Friday night my Xbox 360 finally gave up the ghost and died. It’s out of warranty so I’ll be heading to Best Buy to get the holiday bundle.
Jose says:
hey dud i dont understand anything about the ifconfig (isnt ipconfig) please tell me how to fix this MTU issue 🙁
i really want to know how to fix it :/
June 3, 2009 — 10:29 pm
Jan Dembowski says:
The MTU has to be fixed on your Internet gateway.
In my case that was my Linux box and that’s where I ran that command. If you are having problems, try hooking your Xbox 360 directly to your cable modem and see if you can update that way.
June 4, 2009 — 6:00 am