Topic: PS3 connection issue

[PyroMenace]

Its not really a serious issue, but whenever I log into PSN it messes with my connection on IRC. From what I can tell nothing else get affected, I'll just get kicked from the chatroom for a couple seconds then it auto reconnects back again. As long as PSN is up it does this about once every half hour. Can anyone think of what might cause this?

[scottws]

The only things I can think of off the top of my head are:

• Port triggering rules for ports that both PSN and IRC share.  Note that port triggering and port forwarding are not exactly the same thing and are differentiated features in routers that support port triggering.  I'm not sure if PSN and IRC share any ports, but if they do and you have a port triggering rule set up for when PSN is active, it could mess one or both services up if they are being used at the same time because your router will misroute packets.
• A bad router or switch, or just a really crappy gigabit switch.  Try updating the firmware or try a different router.  I've also seen cases where a company would be using one of those cheap gigabit switches and if more than one person was using the network at a time, the performance was horrible.  Pings were in the 1400 ms range, if there was even a response.  This is because cheap gigabit switches aren't really meant for concurrent sharing of a network connection.  They are really meant to allow multiple devices to share a network connection, one at a time.  Sometimes this can be solved by changing the port speed down to 100 Mbps/full duplex manually because it has something to do with a small and inefficient buffer in the switch.  If one or both devices is wireless, this probably isn't the issue.

[sirean_syan]

I actually had the same problem a few years back when I first got the PS3. I think* I upgraded the firmware for the router and everything righted itself. My router is a Linksys WRT54G, I think a fairly common one (from what I gather) so there's a chance you have the same one.

* While I'm fairly sure this was the case, I'm not completely sure if this was what fixed it or if the problem just righted itself after some other change.