Teacher who can't connect to steam through school network.

[BLUE]

Hello there,
I work as a teacher in a vocational school in the Netherlands, teaching English to nursing students. I used to be able to connect my laptop to Steam from school and sometimes would play games like Fibbage, Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes and Octodad's Medical Mess with my students as a fun way to improve their language creativity, communication skills, or medical vocabulary. As of this semester, I can't seem to connect to Steam. Thinking it might have become school policy to block Steam usage from our end I requested our IT department to re-enable my access. They told me however, that it's the other way around: Steam blocking us. They suggested one of our students may have violated Steam's terns of usage resulting in an IP ban for the entire school. Not sure how to resolve this issue, since I wouldn't be able to guarantee all of our students' behavior, but I'd like to talk to someone from Valve to see what the possibilities are - if any. I hope posting this forum is one way of accomplishing that (I couldn't find an online support form or email address), and other suggestions are welcome too.
Thanks,

Vince

[SpunkyJones]

No such thing as a IP ban. Tell IT to try harder.

[hyli]

If someone broke the ToS their account would banned, not the entire IP address. The idea of steam blocking you from access is really unlikely - Accounts get blocked, not IPs. And even if the account was blocked, you'd still be able to connect.

Try reinstalling steam and see if this fixes it, since about 99% of the time it does.

If it's not connecting you can check your firewall - Make sure communications inbound and outbound for steam are allowed.

Check your AntiVirus. Some of them don't play nice with Steam, namely Norton and AVG, so you'll need to make sure steam is whitelisted.

[demo]

Steam wouldn`t block an IP. Even for TOS breaking, (it could penalise the wrong person because IP`s swap around so much with Dynamic IP`s). You need to look a little deeper at why its not connecting.

[Josuke_Sensei]

i would love to have chu as mai teacher dude.

[BLUE]

Originally posted by Caelon:

If someone broke the ToS their account would banned, not the entire IP address. The idea of steam blocking you from access is really unlikely - Accounts get blocked, not IPs. And even if the account was blocked, you'd still be able to connect.

Try reinstalling steam and see if this fixes it, since about 99% of the time it does.

If it's not connecting you can check your firewall - Make sure communications inbound and outbound for steam are allowed.

Check your AntiVirus. Some of them don't play nice with Steam, namely Norton and AVG, so you'll need to make sure steam is whitelisted.

Thanks for this. I had no idea Steam wouldn't do that, but I guess it makes sense. As to your other points, IT did inform me they tried to connect themselves, confirming my problem, so not sure firewalls or reinstalls would help me here.

I'll "tell IT to try harder" but other suggestions are welcome still.

[Washell]

Originally posted by BLUE:

Thanks for this. I had no idea Steam wouldn't do that, but I guess it makes sense.

To reiterate (giving you extra ammo to take to IT), it's common for entire college dorms in the US to be behind a single IP. If Valve/Steam IP banned, they would be bankrupt now because entire generations of students would learn not to use steam.

[Satoru]

Steam doesn't block IP ranges because doing so is pointless. They block accounts

ITs far more likely your schools internal firewall blocks access to steam. Steam is commonly blocked in may IT organizations due to it being only for games, and because it uses a lot of bandwidth. Steam is blocked in many schools and companies. I'm gonna guess if you try to access a porn site on your school network you will be blocked. I'm pretty sure your school has some kind of web filtering in place to keep the kids from surfing porn during class. By extension that means they can filter things like game websites such as steam.

Though it varies by the type of web filters used, generally speaking they are manually categorized into broad categories to block. For example at my company its borken up into a lot of categoies like: social media (facebook, linked in), web email (hotmail/gmail/yahoo), porn (well obvoiusly), gambling, gaming, video content (youtube, netflix) etc. We block even depending on the network you're on. For example, we can do things like say the 'public' student computers are very very locked down for content, but the 'teachers lounge' computers have wider access to websites.

I'm gonna guess your local IT dept has no idea that there's a firewall in place mandated by the school board for all schools.,, probably since they don't have visibility into it (this is fairly common in schools I've dealt with over the years where the left hand has no idea what the right hand is doing)