My new Xbox 360 S (with Kinect sensor) arrived today and I’m very excited. Unfortunately, I didn’t get the chance to set it up until quite late at night and it took me a while to connect to my home Wi-Fi network, even using the Windows Connect feature, because I use MAC address filtering (in addition to WPA2 encyption). Adding a new MAC address to the Wi-Fi access point is simple enough – except that I had a few problems finding the MAC address for my Xbox 360s.
Once I’d gone through the initial setup (unfortunately I had to complete that before I could access the dashboard), I could examine the network settings in the system blade but, strangely, the MAC address I needed was labelled as the wired MAC address, even though it’s on the Wi-Fi connection (See solution 7 in Microsoft knowledge base article 978945). Just to confuse me further, there was also a MAC address listed in the wireless information (but I think that relates to the connection to the controller…).
Now that I’ve connected to the Internet and installed a couple of system updates, the interface is much less confusing (it now says MAC Address, rather than Wired MAC Address, and gives me the correct one!)
Probably worth mentioning that MAC address filtering doesn’t really do anything for your wireless security? Quite a lot of administrative overhead for virtually no advantage! (Well, it might delay someone 10 seconds or so, but is it really worth it?!)
Hi Sam – I’d agree it’s not really “security” but it is one (of several) layers of defence. Sure, the MAC can be spoofed, but on a low-traffic network such as mine, it might take a while to find a valid one to use (certainly more than 10 seconds)
I agree with Sam – Mac filtering wont make your network more secure. It’s just annoying when you have to connect any new device to your network. Anyway, congrats on getting new Xbox. :-)