Sunday, November 12, 2006

Rant: Hawking Broadband Booster Blocking Inbound Connections

Now this is very strange...

I have a Hawking HBB1 Broadband Booster in my network to help with my online gaming. I love this device, ever since I put it on my network, I "appear" to have absolutly no lag whenever I play games online through my XBox, XBox 360, or PC games.

Now here comes the problem... since I recently consolidated all my olders PC's (which, since moving into my new apartment, have been out of service) on to my server under VMWare, I cannot establish connections from outside my LAN. I troubleshot this issue to death, and determined only 2 things have changed since the last time this worked. First, the PC's were moved into VMWare. Second, the Broadband Booster was added between the Cable Modem and the Router. And wouldn't you know it, if I remove the Broadband Booster from the network, I can connect no problem.

Now this is a little strange. I've had some quirky issues with the Broadband Booster in the past. I've had choppy network connections, intermittent Open status NAT connections using XBox live, and a few other quirks. Almost all of these were corrected with either a little configuration, or a firmware update. Now the Broadband Booster is supposed to be a passive device, it does not act as a NAT device in any way, it only monitors traffic, and adjusts QoS based on what it sees.

So if that is the case, why the hell is it blocking inbound SSH traffic? I suppose in the mean time I will have to remove this little device when not in use, but thats kind of a hassle.

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