LAN Gaming

[MotF Bane]

My friends and I keep getting together for LAN parties. We meet at different locations, with different routers and different internet connections each time. The two most common routers are a single Actiontec MI424WR (with no Internet connection available), and a triple-link of a central Netgear GS605, with another Netgear GS605 and a D-Link (unknown serial) connected behind it. There may be a fourth router, going between the central Netgear and the rest of the house and the outside cable connection. We end up having to fully shut down all of our firewalls (which is bad news at the second location, as it remains on the Internet) to connect to our servers. Our servers are purely LAN-based, namely we use one of our own computers. We also find that only about half of the computers can see each other via file browsing over the network, the others cannot see them. Can anybody help out at all? I'm fairly new to networking, about the extent of my knowledge is Command Prompt's ipconfig and 192.168.#.1. Thanks in advance.

 

[Zap]

Well, software firewalls can often interfere with LAN gaming so the best bet for trouble free gaming is to have them disabled. Just make sure everyone scans their computer regularly (as in day before the LAN) for viruses and malware. Have all the computers behind one router. Other routers can be on the other side of first router. If computers can't browse to other computers for file sharing, then perhaps try accessing by computer name or IP address. For instance, click on Start, click on Run and type in:

\\192.168.0.23
\\COMP

Those are examples, you'll want to type in the actual stuff you have.

 

[tyanni]

Easiest thing to do would be to invest in a switch w\ enough ports to handle all of your machines - multiple routers just complicates things... Use one router and plug the switch into it,