With my Xbox 360, I have had hit or miss connection issues wiht people on xbox live.  Recently it has been with Tiger Woods 07 and Call of Duty 3.  The main reason why I bought COD 3 is for the online play, and it was frustrating when I couldn't get online.  The game would show me available games and I would choose one that had a strong connection.  While trying to connect it would come back with a message similiar to "Game session no longer available, or something close to that.

I then came across this KB article:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/908874/en-us?sd=xbox

This article talks about the ports that need to be open in order to have the best experience on Xbox Live.  Now, I have the DLink DI-524 router that is supposed to be XBox Live compatible, but it appears that it did not open the ports that are listed in the KB article.  Ports 88, 2074, and 3074 all need to be setup to be forwarded to your xbox. 

As a reminder to myself, and possibly others who come across this, here are the steps I took to get my Xbox working:

Navigate to the admin tool of your router.  This is usually done by type 192.168.0.1 in the address bar of your browser.  Once you are there you should see a screen like this:

home page

Ensure you are on the home tab and click on the DHCP button on the left so we can assign the xbox a static IP. The DHCP screen should look like this:

DHCP screen

On the DHCP screen, there should be a list of DHCP clients that have previously connected to your router.  To find your Xbox MAC address you will need to go to your Xbox 360 dashboard and head to the system blade.  Then go to network settings, edit settings, additional settings tab, then the second group that shows advanced settings.  Once you get in there it will show your MAC address.  Now I have a wired Xbox, so it shows the MAC address for the wired connection.  I am sure if you are connected wirelessly, it will show the MAC address for your wireless connection. 

Once you have your MAC address, go back to your router admin and find it in the list of DHCP clients and click clone.  Then, in the IP field, give it an IP address.  This will be the IP address that the Xbox always gets assigned when it connects.  Click apply when done, and you should see it listed in the Static DHCP Client list.

Once you have a static IP setup, next, click the Advanced tab and ensure the Virtual Server button is highlighted.  The Virtual Server page should look something like this:

Virtual Server page

Here is where we will setup the port forwarding for ports 88, 2074, 3074, just follow these steps:

  1. Ensure that the enabled radio button is selected. 
  2. Name the virtual server.  
  3. Put in the IP you just assigned to your Xbox in the previous step. 
  4. Set the protocol type to both. 
  5. For both private and public port type in 88
  6. Set the schedule to Always
  7. Click Apply
  8. Reat steps 1 - 6 and enter port number 2074 and 3074 for step 5.

Once these steps have been completed, click the Tools tab along the top, then click the misc button on the left, then click the reboot button.  Once the router comes back up, restart your Xbox 360.  My first attempt at playing after these changes still gave me the same error, but when I tried again it worked. Hopefully by following these steps, you have the same success as I do.

For people with other routers, the two main steps are to setup a static IP address for your xbox and setup port forwarding.  Here is a good web site to help setup the port forwarding, http://www.portforward.com/routers.htm

Good Luck