A Mind Lost

A friend of mine had problems all through last week connecting to the Playstation Network with his PS3 even though he had had no problems since buying the console over a year ago.  Not having a PS3 myself I know very little about them, but, assuming is was a networking problem, I offered to have a look.  It turns out it is a common problem with numerous solutions which work for some and not others.

The problem presents itself by allowing your PS3 to connect to anything on the internet including browsing the Sony store and using the BBC iPlayer.  If you try to connect to the Playstation Network though in order to play online, it reports that it is taking too long and you should check your network connection.  If you do a network test it will report success for the IP address and internet tests and then a fail for the Playstation Network test.

To cure the problem there are a few things which have worked for one of more people:

1)  Give the PS3 a static IP address and put it into the DMZ on your router.

2)  Change the MTU setting in the PS3 network settings to 1492  (this appears to be the most common solution)

3)  Change the DNS settings to the OpenDNS servers (208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220)

4)  Some have reported that they cannot connect with a signal strength on their wireless connection of less than 70%

5)  The most extreme fix after people got no help from Sony, their router manufacturer or their ISP?  Buying a new PS3!

None of the above worked in this case, however.  But after an hour of searching I found a single report where someone had tried the MTU setting of 1492 and it didn’t cure their problem but they discovered that a value of 1400 did work and this is what worked in this case as well.

I don’t know why it worked but setting the MTU to 1400 on the pS3 did the trick.  I am curious as to why the Playstation Network connection is so fussy about it’s settings and what changed to make this fix necessary.

Update: 01/03/2010

I’ve noticed a big spike today in traffic to this post today.  The cause appears to be a large number of older-style PS3 consoles being shut off the network due to a calendar problem.  The problem is global and widespread it seems.  More details here.