Hey everyone.... lol u may remember me!
 
I could bore u all with what ive been up to but to be honest its really boring!
 
Anyhow, onto business.
 
NFS has always been a great game and of course i jumped at the shelves when i went to my games shop
 
Got home, installed it, and drove around the virtual world like some rude boy (minus the baseball cap).
 
After a few days i thought id try the online gaming. Out of habit I tried GameSpy but of course no games there since its all done through the game itself! haha so anyways I click on "online" in the game only to be greated with the following: "Connection lost, please retry, please make sure you are connected to the network", or words to that effect. Slightly puzzled, I read the readme.txt file (the one ur supposed to read striaght away :x )
 
It tells me to open up some ports on my firewall. So I browse to my router and do that. Thought it was strange since the router is normally pretty insecure with outgoing connections- its usual stance is to block everything from the outside world. So anyway i open up a few ports and try again. Still no luck....
 
Thinking that the game might be just lying (the error message was shown instantly so it looked like it didnt even try to connect to EA) I went onto the net in search of a packet sniffer. For those who dont know, that simply shows me the data that goes to and from my pc. The aim here was to run it and see if NFS was actually sending anything.
 
I came across AnalogX and tried that, since the download was a lot smaller than ethereal, and i couldnt be bothered to wait that long (!) for ethereal...
 
Installed AnalogX packet sniffer and hit the start button. Got a funky error of "Could not open socket"!!! Socket?? eeeek!!
 
Hmmm every other game I own works ok online (Renegade, Doom3, Joint Ops, TOCA, Soldner....)
 
Casting my mind back, I remember going to Steve Gibson's website- http://www.grc.com. Great site, I am sure many of u have been there. There is a program called socket lock on there. I used it because i had no need for raw sockets. At least i thought id never have a need. So i visit the page and it says:
 
"Please note that SocketLock is NOT meant to be used with the final release of Windows XP. This demonstration was only created to prove — without a shadow of doubt — that Microsoft can EASILY engineer a superior and secure solution to the problem of unnecessary raw socket exposure."
 
Ahh ok so maybe i have been too secure!! LOL
 
So I run the program and put everything back to XP standard.
 
Back to the sniffer... click "start" and get no error. Great so far....
Go into NFS and hit "online". The ****** thing works!! EA need raw sockets to get me gaming online??
 
I run XP SP2. A note from microsoft:
 
"We have removed support for TCP sends over RAW sockets in SP2.
We surveyed applications and found the only apps using this on XP were
people writing attack tools."
 
So now im really confused..... either NFS is an attack tool or i am really missing something here!!!!
 
Anyway the point is, if u play NFS Underground 2 and you cant get online, check to see if your sockets are ok on your install. If u used socket lock from GRC, go back in and enable sockets again.