Perpetual "Connecting..." (PlanetSide 1.5 & ZoneAlarm issue)

Solendon · 2003-06-20, 07:05 PM

I obviously downloaded the new 1.5 patch today to discover I kept getting a perpetual "Connecting..." message when attempting to log on. After a short time I narrowed it to my ZoneAlarm Pro firewall (v3.5.169.002).

The first test I did that made this conclusive was simply turning off the firewall by exiting ZoneAlarm. This cured the issue as I could now login.

So I assumed SOE starting using a new port or TCP packet type that was being blocked by ZoneAlarm. Looking through the logs I could see PlanetSide attempting to connect to sdkpls-login-01.planetside.com:45004, but I could not see why it was being blocked.

ZoneAlarm is program centric not port centric for port configuration. It was definitely configured to allow the PlanetSide executables but it was not working. So I decided to do two things, first allow all the odd packet types and even explicitly port 45004 on TCP and UDP. That having failed, I set ZoneAlarm to low security for the Internet zone, effectively disabling the firewall. That still did not work.

I've come to the conclusion that PlanetSide is for some reason locking up with ZoneAlarm simply running. If I exit ZoneAlarm, PlanetSide will connect properly. I say locking up, because when this happens I have to reboot my machine as I can not get out of Planet side even with CTRL-ALT-DEL.

IC3NIN3 · 2003-06-23, 10:21 PM

Yeah, me too. This is how you get around ZA's shortcomings. just turn the "Outgoing Program Control" to off. And then PlanetSide will connect just fine. If you're scanning for spyware regularly (and you should be

), then outgoing program control isn't a big deal anyway. ZA is still blocking unwanted incoming traffic.

Solendon · 2003-06-24, 09:01 AM

Originally posted by IC3NIN3
Yeah, me too. This is how you get around ZA's shortcomings. just turn the "Outgoing Program Control" to off. And then PlanetSide will connect just fine.

No, my problem is larger than that. I did that and it didn't work. Like I said in my previous post, it seems as though ZoneAlarm in memory is causing PS to lock-up when it tries to connect.