Cant get on game :(

[annewandering]

Desperate! Can not log in to FFXI
Got dc'd thursday and havent been able to get back on since.
Ok I have
Acer
Aspire X1420G
Proc: Amd Athlon II x4 645 processor 3.10 GHz
64 bit operating system
Windows Home Premium
service pack 1

I get the POL: 1160 Error, which is the cable, hardwear etc error.
Ok so I checked all that out. No problem and I can get on the internet everywhere else EXCEPT most SE sites. I can get on them occasionally but not long enough to post, for instance in the FFXI Forum tech support forum.Hopefully this post gets through!. Also not able to access Support through Playoneline.com although able to pull that site up. Occasionally I can pull up the management site. Long enough to have input the keys for Abyssea on a second account. And to input the key for the Destrier hat which I did before I realized the extent of my problem.
I have talked to my tech support at my IPS and they have run me through the rebooting etc processes to no avail.
I have gone through all my potential blocking features that I can think of and made them all very low protection. At one point I even disabled my virus checker, AVG to try to connect the game. (its back up so no poking around!)
I tried, also to bring the game up on my husband's computer. No luck. At all. Same thing.
Ok I have run out of ideas. Anyone have one? or two? Please? I need help for my addiction!

[annewandering]

Oh and my soninlaw in a nearby town is able to get on the game with no problem. He does us a different ips.

[RAIST]

sounds like a routing issue between you and SE---need to get your ISP involved. May not be your ISP, but could be one of the 15-20 some odd hops in between you and SE's servers. Ultimately, they will need to run traces to find the problem. Ideally, you would want to hit the ones that are stalling when you are connecting, but you wiill need to run something like netstat or TCPView in the background to catch the IP's.

Some known servers they can try to use are the DNS servers and such that get referenced by name in some of the game files:

square-enix.com (202.67.53.202)
SE DNS servers (dns1.square-enix.com to dns4.square-enix.com): 202.67.53.31, 202.67.53.95, 202.67.53.32, 202.67.53.96)

ffxi00.pol.com (124.150.154.122)
c000.pol.com (202.67.54.52)

Note there is a big mess cutting across the US atm with severe thunderstorms, knocking down lots of power lines and such---not just the lines/transformers themselves....the poles are actually getting knocked down and uprooted in some areas. Communications that pass through these regions may very well be temporarily disrupted until repairs or workarounds can be implemented. One such region is Virginia/West Virginia, which has been known to cause some issues in the past for the Southeast.

[annewandering]

I might just want to hold off panicking for a few more days then, till they get electricity etc all back up in those areas. I have wondered if that might be the problem because like right now I am on this site. Doubt I will be for long. It is very flakey but the game has been down. I did manage to get to the pick character screen once today but it booted me while connecting to the lobby.
Tracking the signal sounds like a miserable mess to me.

[annewandering]

talked to ips about ports. The told me the would fix those ports SE needs. Still cant get on. I cant leave a 'ticket' on ffxi support because I cant get on there long enough to click from page one to page 2.
Honestly, I am very close to giving up. I just cant think of anything else I can do. Someone suggested an vpn but that seems pretty radical of a solution, if it worked.

[Ojba]

I am having a POL 1566 or something like that problem on my PS2 I am wondering if Tech Support actually fixes things since I've been reading post of people having the same problem like 12 hours ago

[Serei]

i myself have been trying to get on. been getting pol-1160 as well. guess i'll try again this afternoon. or after lunch

[annewandering]

Using a vpn I was able to get on the game briefly, even returning to mog. Still there were numerous ro's for the entire 5 minutes I was on till I was finally disconnected completely to the first login menu.
I do notice that I have been having fewer problems getting on to here. Still dont have much confidence especially since the vpn didnt work very well.
Took my computer to my daughters house in a nearby town, different internet provider. Everything works great. It is not my computer. Narrowing it down. Slowly.

[RAIST]

It is very possible there may be some issues with the exchanges out there atm. Started getting some random lag spikes and short R0's today, so ran a trace. Looks like something going on over there with asianetcom.net, or at least the connection to their segments. Everything was good getting thorugh to pacnet, but once it hit asianetcom, latency went through the roof...more so than usual. I'm talking some hits were over 300ms a hop, not the usual 150-200ms. So yeah...something out there in between is getting funky.

Here's something you guys might want to try, it may help your ISP's research what is going on. Contact them about your issues and ask them to run a tracert from your modem to this IP:

124.150.154.84

Ordinarily, I'd give a quick how-to for how to run the tracert yourself so you could actually see what is going on, but utlimately you would just be forwarding your findings to your ISP to research it. Any ISP worth their salt should be able to do this while terminaled in to your modems....might as well make them earn that monthly fee.

[annewandering]

Raist, I put on a program called VisualRouter 2010. It shows the route visually to what ever connection you are wanting to check. Most times I put in a SE number it goes to qwest in denver then an unidentified point then to Japan. When it gets to Japan the connections turn yellow because of low speed. Sometimes it gets to a bounce point just before SE then turns red. Does any of this make sense?

[annewandering]

does SE have a lockout if you try more than a certain number of times even if you have the right pws?

[Daniel_Hatcher]

does SE have a lockout if you try more than a certain number of times even if you have the right pws?

Yes, if you logon too many times incorrectly they block it for a certain period of time 15 minutes~1 hour I believe.

Try disabling the firewall and any virus scan.

If it works try disabling one at a time and see if which one is causing the problem, may also be worth temporarily disabling the firewall on your modem/router and checking.

Obviously don't leave them off, just to check if it's a problem with them.

PS. I had this problem before, ended up being a problem with the ISP.

[RAIST]

been a while since I used the MyCoolTools apps (Vizualware). I think that one is just measuring the latency...and running from US to JP is going to have high lag in general, typically hovering around the 200ms mark for me (compared to <90 just about anywhere in NA and sometimes even EU).

What you are usually looking for with FFXI is whether you are are hitting a "blackhole" situation (stalled routing) or packet loss. Tracert is a quick, easy DOS command that reports the round-trip time to each hop in the path to your destination, so is usually a quick way to check for stalls in routing (which is usually the case when this is going on). You may even have a ping tool in your router config pages where you can put the IP in yourself to test it outside of your internal network (tracert starts from your PC and may be affected by security software and such, doing it from the router or modem takes your system out of the equation).

You can run a handy tool called TCPView (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897437.aspx) (Microsfot link) to see all your TCP connections in real time to capture the IP's you are actually using (or run netstat -s in a DOS box while connecting to do the same thing). You will see some IP's go into a waiting state while connecting/zoning, often times will have a port ID appended like 4002, 5001, etc that are in the recommended port forwarding guidelines. They tend to release fast in TCPView, where as netstat will report them for a longer period of time, so I usually use that myself. More often than not, these are the connections that are getting dropped--the active connections are just that, actively transmitting and can be considered good. It's the ones that go into standby, waiting for server response or waiting to transmit to the server that typically cause the problem---they don't transmit/receive when expected and you get bounced.

One thing often overlooked (and why it gets so heavily stressed to check local security software logs/settings), is that FFXI uses a lot of UDP transmission. This protocol has no mechanism to make sure the packets reach the destination--if it gets lost, so be it. Have to just wait for the next cycle to update. But...if after x amount of time you or the server don't get these packets, disconnection happens. That's why it's important to check your security logs and rules. A lot of times only TCP gets allowed/enabled--and not the UDP. So, you connect initially via TCP but eventually you loose the UDP "heartbeat", and get thrown off a few minutes later. If ou are setting your own port forwarding in your router, you may notice you have options for setting just TCP, just UPD, or both TCP/UDP in the rule. You want to make sure you are allowing BOTH protocols, whether that needs to be two seperate rules for each protocol, or one that enables both protocols. Likewise, if someone else is setting the forwarding for you (like your ISP), make sure they know you need BOTH TCP and UDP forwarded.

[EDIT]: Oh yeah, though it is rare, I have even seen some people have DNS from SE get blocked. If DNS calls are logged as being rejected, need to reverse-lookup the IP (sometimes you get lucky just googling the IP, but somehere like dnsstuff.com has tools for it) to see if it's SE. If it is confirmed to be an SE IP, need to allow it through either with a DNS enable/allow rule or just enable/allow that IP.

More in depth tools are out there to test other things, but usually all that is needed is the trace to find a problematic segment. If everything checks out for generic connectivity through tracing and the quality of your service is under suspiscion, something like DSLreports.com's Line Quality Test can help you determine if there are packet loss or high jitter issues on your line due to interference, poor tuning, etc. closer to home (these typically test thinkgs more like your ISP's local segments, your closest node and such). Another thing you could try there is the Tweaktest (this is a quicker tool than line quality, but less info). If TwekTest detects retransmitted packets, it's usually a sign that something isn't tuned right somewhere either at the system and/or ISP level that is causing packets to get discarded and retried. Other sites have similar tools, this is just one I have bookmarked and I hit it a lot out of habit.

These things are sometimes tricky to track down....but someone has to get the ball rolling, or it could take weeks to resolve (as seen about a month ago in the UK...was like a month before that mess got sorted out with O2/BT).

{edit}
As Daniel mentioned above, sometimes it is our own Router that can be causing the problem. Some have built-in firewalls, elvated security for NAT and such. The config pages vary from brand to brand, and even model to model within the same brand, so it's hard to give examples. But there should be details on the settings either in online help within the config pages, or in a manual or PDF on the install disc. If you see things like NAT Security, SIP ALG, SPI Firewall options and such you are heading you in the right direction.

[annewandering]

interesting new line on TCPview. visicom-47.national.net.

visicom-47.nationalnet.com

visicom-47.nationalnet.com IP address location & more:
Host of the IP: visicom-47.nationalnet.com[Whois] [Reverse IP]
Host IP [?]: 66.115.174.8 [Whois] [Reverse IP]
IP country code: US
IP address country: United States
IP address state: Georgia
IP address city: Marietta
IP postcode: 30067
IP address latitude: 33.9306
IP address longitude: -84.4613
ISP of this IP [?]: NationalNet
Organization: NationalNet
Local time in United States: 2012-07-06 16:24

It does a wait then goes red then closes. pol.exe does the same.

[RAIST]

hmm...that sounds a bit odd. The contact info on that site's registration at TUCOWS is dns2@websol.net (WebSolutions of Georgia). They host all kinds of websites there....who knows what is trying to connect to a site in the background. Have you run malware scans and such? You might have picked up a DNS redirector or something, who knows. Or possibly your ISP has been hit by the malware that the FBI has been up in arms about (can test it from the links at www.dcwg.org (http://www.dcwg.org/)). If you don't have one, malwarebytes.org has a pretty good free malware scanner for personal use (click the Download button for redirect to a mirroring site for the free version) It's one of the tools that tons of companies turn to for troubleshooting malware problems--even other malware/security/antivirus companies will point to it when their support team is having trouble cleaning something.

[Zamms]

I had issues like this when i had Verizon DSL, signal would be weak random ro, not being able to connect or stay connected. I switched to Comcast and i have not had any issues since. It maybe something to look into.