Question about STEAM and firewall at school!

[hmammen]

At our academy we are issued school laptops and i am wanting to DL steam and play a little CS1.6....
well i DLed steam and i installed everything into a folder. when i try to boot up steam it has to go through its little update....but it stops and says "steam is temporarily unavailable....please try again later"....
but it does that all the time every time....even when im at home...
do you think its something in the computer or just because of my schools firewall blocking it....!??! any help would be appreciated- hunter

 

[sulliman24]

Hmm interesting. I am at a University also in PA and we have to login into a program called Clean Access Agent to access the internet. There are certain ports that must be open in order for steam to work. There is a chance your University closed them which if they did screws you over. However, if it says that weird updating thing that means your internet connection in general doesn't work. Are you connected to the internet? In other words when you are opening steam can you open Internet Explorer and go to yahoo.com or something and check e-mail? Chances are though from what I know is that your school is blocking those ports. I forget what the exact ports are but they are on steams website.

Maybe you are forgetting to login into a network login program like I login to. Also, go into steam properties and make sure you have the connection set to something other then Dial Up 56k.

Let me know if this helps.

 

[hmammen]

thanks for the reply.....yes i am connected to the internet and yes steam is setup for more than 56k.....so last option is my school blocks steam ports....o well....if any one else has any ideas let me know...but i guess no CS for me at school....

 

[sulliman24]

Whats the name of the University you go to? Give me the link to your university home page and I will look for you if you want. I am sure they have a ResNET policy that lays out the terms. My University lays out the terms and specificly states that their stance on Online Gaming is neutral. Therefore, I have to compete with other students for network bandwith at peak times. A lot of times I can't play because my ping is outrageous.

Click this link below and look at Steam Technical Issues:

http://support.steampowered.com/cgi-bin/steampowered.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=11

This will lead you to a connectivity test that will let you know if the required ports are open.

To test your ports open up your steam client and click the following:

steam://support/?Issues=*&Tests=Ports


The link above should solves your problem and truly let you know if the ports are open.

Hope this helps