While Sony says the PlayStation Network is up and running following the Christmas attack, some users are still having trouble connecting to services on their PS4. Here’s a network setting that’s gotten several of our readers up and running again.
What they did was go into the “Network” option under “Settings” in the PS4 menu. Then they selected “Set Up Internet Connection”, “Use Wi-Fi” and then “Custom.” They found the proper internet connection and filled in the appropriate settings until they got to “MTU Settings”. There they clicked the “Manual” option and changed the default value for maximum transmission units from 1,500 to 1,473. Once they completed filling out the settings, they then were able to connect.
Like any fix, this might not work for you. Readers ThatGamingMinecrafter and Liquid-X were able to connect in this fashion, but your mileage may vary.
Comments
12 responses to “Still Having Trouble Connecting To PSN? Try This.”
Worked a treat for me. I could connect via the app, but not ps4. Did as above and presto! Making up for lost time on Destiny now.
Hi, I’m TV’s dr_van_nostrand and I fully endorse this fix. While you wait for your fix to take place why not have a sip of Crown Royal Canadian Whiskey? Ahhhhh, Crown Royal, for that smooth smooth whiskey taste without the bogan / adolescent connotations of bourbon or whiff of crazy homeless alcoholic-ness of Scotch.
Duff
Sigh… im not even going to bother… ill just drop this here instead:
http://www.tp-link.us/article/?faqid=190
I’m with you on this. I don’t even know where to start. Lets not get into why that TP-Link article isn’t correct for every situation either.
exactly…. it is however light years ahead of this article…
pretty impressed with the quality of information on the tp-link article though! never expected that!
Quick explanation for the peanut gallery… if I get any details wrong, corrections are welcome, but this should be basically accurate.
To be brief here: MTU is the Maximum Transmission Unit – the largest packet size that the system will use when sending data. Any data that your computer sends that requires a packet bigger than the MTU to be sent in one piece is broken down into pieces small enough that data +packet overhead will not exceed the MTU.
This matters because sometimes the equipment between where you are and where your packets are going wants a smaller MTU. When this happens, it will break your packets into smaller pieces (refragmentation). As well as presenting a larger load on the receiving hardware (because it has to reassemble the packets) some hardware isn’t good at fragmenting packets, and some isn’t good at reassembling them. Firewalls, in particular, tend to have trouble handling fragmented packets. You generally want to avoid your packets getting refragmented.
Selecting a smaller MTU can be done to reduce or eliminate fragmentation by the network infrastructure. However there are a couple of downsides. A smaller MTU means that on average more bandwidth will be wasted , and that the chance of a small message being sent as multiple rather than single packets increases.
As such, setting a smaller MTU will generally increase reliability, but not always, and effective bandwidth WILL be lower.
In normal operation, most modern systems should be able to automatically select the correct MTU for a particular connection though.
They start the connection by sending large packets with the “do not fragment” bit set, which means that any link where the packet would usually need to be fragmented in order to be sent will instead send an “fragmentation required” ICMP error packet back. The sender can then vary the MTU for the connection until packets can be sent without error.
You are right that firewalls can sometimes require manually setting the MTU, but this is usually when they have been misconfigured to drop the ICMP messages on the floor. In this case, your packets get dropped because they’ve asked not to be fragmented, and you never find out that this is the reason they were dropped.
Agreed, but there’s a heck of a lot of broken network equipment and firewall configurations out there.
The PSN “fix” may be working because somebody got careless when configuring a firewall.
I still remember an ancient BSD-based system where autoconfiguring the MTU was a default-off option…
Most transit networks, ISPs and home routers seem to be fairly well configured these days. Its the corporate networks (and corporate VPNs in particular) that have this sort of problem, since they often start by disallowing everything.
My guess is that Sony was locking down their border firewalls to try and combat the DDoS, and didn’t realise that some ICMP messages are required for correct operation of TCP/IP.
Working yesterday and last night.
Woke up and it’s down.
Seriously should of purchased an xbox because Sony are a bunch of muppets.
Changed mtu and can get into the store with no online games.
Worked perfect thanks