Steam fails to login (On a NAC network)

My dorm unit uses PacketFence to control access to the internet and blocks off P2P connections. The Steam client can't connect, is it due to the NAC?

 

More likely, your school has simply blocked the ports that steam uses. There's a note to that effect on this webpage:

In addition, as the note states, you won't be able to remap the ports that you need for steam either.

 

Now steam logs in... but it keeps crashing. Has it anything to do with the beta UI?

 

What sort of error messages do you get with the crash?

 

No messages. It just goes unresponsive. With the beta client, it does it like 1 minute or so after loading, doesn't matter if I click on it or not. Reinstalled and now it crashes on the login window.

Running Win7 Home Pre 64-bit.

 

Check in the event logs; something will have been logged there that will indicate what the cause of the crash was.

 

- System

- Provider

[ Name] Application Hang

- EventID 1002

[ Qualifiers] 0

Level 2

Task 101

Keywords 0x80000000000000

- TimeCreated

[ SystemTime] 2010-03-08T17:39:07.000000000Z

EventRecordID 2416

Channel Application

Computer hunterseeker-PC

Security


- EventData

Steam.exe
1.0.778.935
84c
01cabee61cebc251
25
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\Steam.exe
78990e0c-2ad9-11df-aeaa-0026b9ae45be
55006E006B006E006F0077006E0000000000


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Binary data:


In Words

0000: 006E0055 006E006B 0077006F 0000006E
0008: 0000


In Bytes

0000: 55 00 6E 00 6B 00 6E 00 U.n.k.n.
0008: 6F 00 77 00 6E 00 00 00 o.w.n...
0010: 00 00 ..

 

After letting it update, the thing just hangs on "connecting to steam account: XXXXXX" sigh.

 

This is more or less a guess from what's contained in that event log data, but I think it looks like the app is hanging because it's not getting any packets back from the steam servers, and that's causing it to block on listening to the network to the point where it gets forced to close - and this is probably where it's crashing instead of failing gracefully due to the fact that it's a beta and not a RTM version of the software.

That suggests to me that the ports steam uses are, in fact, being blocked by your university, and the app is crashing because it hasn't been coded to deal gracefully with blocked ports.

 

funny thing is, it was working for a while before...

 

Then a wild guess might be that they finally decided to shut those ports down - too many kids running steam on the network!

 

Hardly, people use... "non-steam" games on the network. I think I'm the only steam user on the network.... Now its working again. Looool.

 

Apparently they aren't blocking those ports, then; however, just because people play "non-steam" games on the network doesn't ipso facto mean that steam games will play - different ports and all that.

 

I was meaning "the very shady type of non-steam games"

 

Aah!

 

Yep those work for them, so the games itself should run without issues. Now steam's A OK but my L4D2 is blocked from installing... Something about region locking.... Sigh.