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PC on a Mac network

A

Asthmaboy

Senior member
Well, I've so far set everything up on a wireless network.
My dad's Airport Extreme Base is sitting downstairs and I have a very strong connection for both my Mac and PC.

However, in some problems, I seem to have problems connecting(Like games, such as Counterstrike:Source, sometimes with AIM, sometimes with YIM, and sometimes Call of DUty2).

I'm wondering if I could just hook up my PC to my Mac through ethernet cable and was wondering how this would work if I were to hook it to my Mac.

Answers, Suggestions, etc?

EDIT: In CS:S, I keep getting 2 of the little bars on the loading window, and it fails after retrying 4 times, which is just how CS:S works, I guess.
However, sometimes I'm able to connect to servers.
I'm having no trouble at all with America's Army or Call of Duty2, which is confusing to me as BF2 and CS:S are giving me problems.
I have an Airlink Wireless card, and I connect through: "Connect to..." > "Wireless Network Connection".
Although when I click "show connections", nothing comes up.

EDIT2: To be specific, the Airport router is an old Graphite 802.11B cnnection.
 
Sounds like a port problem to me, linked with this NAT stuff. I'm almost sure that the Airport Extreme Base Station acts as a router and there's only one IP for all clients?

I've encountered similar problems in this network constellation. Games that can't connect correctly if more than one client is behind the same IP (read, router) or PCs that can't host games because their router blocks some ports.

This problem should be solvable without knowing specifically the Airport Extreme Base Station, but don't ask me for details... Maybe there are program specific solutions available, too (p.e. Blizzard provides instructions how to change a Windows registry entry to solve the one IP-more clients problem in Starcraft Broodwar through amplified game port range). So a post in the software forum may also provide you with some helpful suggestions.

To connect the PC via the Mac to the router won't help if your PC normally connects correctly. I'm not sure if this is possible anyway.
 
Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
What ports did you forward to your Windows machine?
Click to expand...

Eh?
I really know nothing about networking, other than "click to connect to this network with the network name and enter your password now".

That's how I do it on my Mac.
🙁
 
On the apple router you will have to forward ports to the windows machine. The ports should be game/application specific. I'm not sure how to do it with the apple router though.
 
OK, this doesn't happen _every_ time for any particular problem game? If the game connects (even sometimes, as you describe) then it's unlikely to be a port problem.

It sounds like bad reception, or maybe a problem with the router or modem dropping your connection intermittently. You say you have good signal strength? Do you have numbers for signal/noise ratio? Assuming the signal is fine, I would suspect the second option... does this happen on both the MAC and the PC? If so, it's likely the modem or the router is having problems dealing with traffic volumes, or failing in some way.

 
Both the Mac and PC seem to get full signal, and they're both in my room.
However, my Mac is an iMac so the whole thing sits on top of my desk while with the PC, the box is down below and further from the door.
 
n0cmonkey is right, you have to deal with the port configuration of the Airport base station to solve this problem and I'll try to describe how to do it.

A port is an attribute of every data packet the Airport base station recieves from and sends to the internet. The port number is between 0 and 63535. Some of them are program specific (e.g. port 80 for web browsers/HTTP) (Link). They also make it possible that more than one computer behind a router can communicate with the internet at the same time with just one IP.

First you need a computer with the Airport Administration Utility installed (Link to the Windows version; on Macs you can find it in the folder Macintosh HD > Applications > Utilities).

1.
Start the Program, scan for the Airport base station and log in.

2.
A new window for the base station appears. Select "Network" in the bar. Report if your configuration differs from the following:

Distribute IP adresses: checked
Share a single IP adress: checked
Share a range of IP adresses: unchecked
Enable PPP dial-in: unchecked

3.
Now you need the local IP adresses of all computers where you exclusively want run a program (e.g. your PC's IP for CS:S because it doesn't run on your Mac anyway). This solution is not applicable for programs you want to use on more than one computer in the WLAN (e.g. using the same instant messaging protocol on more than one computer in your household).

To get the IP of your mac, in the dock click the System Preferences. Then click the Network icon. Select "Airport" from the connection options and chlick the "choose" button. Now click "TCP/IP" in the bar, voilà the IP Address. In Windows it should be somewhere in the network settings, too. The IP should be in the 10.0.x.x, 172.16.x.x or 192.168.x.x range.

4.
Next you need the the port numbers those programs use. A bunch of them can be found in the Wikipedia article I linked to, but for others you might to search elsewhere or ask in a forum.

5.
Back to the computer where you run the Airport Administration Utility. In the window for your base station, click "Port Mapping" in the bar. Then click the button "Add".

Let's say you want to use AIM (which uses port number 5190) exclusively on the computer with the IP 10.1.1.4: Fill in the following values in the dialog box:

Public Port: 5190
Private Address: 10.1.1.4
Private Port: 5190

Do this for all ports you wish to map. After that, click the "Update" button in the bottom right.

6.
After a certain time the same problem could appear again. That's because the computer in question changes his IP address now and then; I neither know how frequently nor where to configure this. It's a feature of DHCP which is used for all the easy network configuration you enjoyed 😉 To solve the problem, either change the port mapping in the Airport Administration Utility, or manually restore the client computer's IP.
 
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