provato wrote:Thanks for your quick reply CanEh!
Now, problem with connection at my place is a bit more complicated. I'm sharing the connection with a friend next floor and he is the one having the router connected to his pc-phone line. So I'm basically router-user #2. So we contacted the ISP and now we are gonna split the connection so each one has his own modem
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What a nightmare... the truth is you dont NEED a seperate modem, nor do you NEED a seperate router. And to be honest, I have to ponder on the (lack of) intelligence of your ISP. ADSL (analog digitial subscriber line) is a way of sending data on higher frequencies over the existing phone line. This line is not shielded, and it is not designed to do what the phone companies do. The farther away from the telephone exchange you are, the poorer quality the signal is.
From the ADSL unit.. he hooks up a router... routers will have at least 4 ports. He plugs his computer into one port, you plug your computer into another port. (notice.. I said nothing about YOU having a router!)
From THERE... THEN you can configure the router to do the port forwarding things that the zone needs. It's so simple, its pathetic. Now with that said, there ARE potential problems. The ADSL unit is powered all of the time. The router is powered all of the time. The chances of the computers being powered all of the time is a lot less. You remember that the router needs to know the IP of the machine connected, and this is a potential "gotcha". Lets say both computers are turned off. Over a period of time the router will say "ok, I'm free for the next connection". He turns his system on.. he gets the first IP assigned by the router. You turn yours on.. you get the second. For arguements sake, lets say that the ports are setup for being forwarded to the second machines IP.. so far, so good. Then you both turn your systems off.
Next, you turn yours on... you get the first IP NOT him.. therefore the router will NOT forward the ports for the game as it did before. Yes, there is a solution. You can setup the computers to use static IPs instead of having them assigned by the DHCP system. That takes a bit of work and for that you have to configure windows on both machines, and tell the router not to assign addresses. If you choose that route then I suggest you start to read the fine manual (RTFM) on the router on how to do that, and use google and make sure you find the instructions on how to configure the machines. That part is way too complex for me to get into here in this post.
The OTHER option you have is... ISP's may allow 2 IP's on your connection. If thats the case, then you buy a SWITCH, hook the switch up to the ADSL unit, and the switch will channel each of the IP's to each machine. From there you can THEN install your OWN router, so that you have a form of a hardware firewall, and you can each configure your own ports without having to worry about IP's being cross assigned between the systems.
Which option is best, depends on your ISP and your ability to successfully make your machine into using a static IP address. Either way, going the route by getting more stuff from the ISP seems to be a bit absurd. The POTS line (plain old telphone service) can only handle limited bandwidth, and that gets less and less the farther away you are from the physical telephone exchange. If I were you, I would start out by just running an ethernet cable between your computer and his router, and get rid of the router you have because it simply will not work. Essentially you have 2 traffic cops trying to direct and control traffic, both of them are blind and deaf. They simply can not work together that way.
Once you have the cable run you can then access HIS router (just as you did yours), make note of the IP assigned to your machine, and then set the ports for the game... If all of a sudden one day the game stops working, then the first thing to check is to see if your IP is still the same. Chances are the router swapped IP's at some point. From there you just need to update the router configurations to your "new" ip and everything will be fine. Depending on how many entries you have available in the router configuration screen, it is also possible that you can just duplicate the entries and assign group 1 to his IP and group 2 to your IP. This way if the router does swap IP's because the machines were turned off, you will never see any issues.
The choices are many. Decide what you want to do. Unless the ISP is going to provide you with dual service for the price of one, getting a "new modem" is NOT the answer. But then again, I don't know what they are going to supply, nor do I know what the costs are..
Food for thought...
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when hosting after I press launch I get: "Note: Not all players are ready to launch." What's goin' on here?
