Using NAT32 question.....

[Electric Amish]

If I use NAT32 to connect multiple computers to my cable internet, can I play games such as Asheron's Call from multiple computers at the same time??

tia

amish

 

[Spurst]

Yes, that is the purpose of NAT32.

Have you also tried using win98SE/2000's built in ICS feature?

 

[ragiepew]

ICS is a slimmed down version of NAT. If all your trying to do is connect computers to the net and not worry about anything else (security, administration, and an other issues that NAT encompases) then I would use ICS because its simpler to do and simpler to administer. thats just my opinion though... afterall there are some benefits to NAT...

 

[Electric Amish]

Yeah, but don't games like Asheron's Call require that the people that are connected have unique IP addresses? If 2 people on my LAN connect to the AC server, won't it look like they are both coming from the same IP?

amish

 

[ragiepew]

Electric- Are you running win98 or win2k? if your running win2k then you can setup DHCP do dish out IP's and/or you can designate IP's if your running win98. what ICS and NAT do is disguise the IP's and make it look like only one IP is going out of the network (the one for the server). Also, NAT acts like a DHCP server in that it will dish out IP's to the computers in your network. another name for ICS/NAT is IP Masquerading.... (spelling?) maybe youve heard of that.. damn microsoft likes to change the names of common things.

 

[ragiepew]

Oh, and your right about the IP thing. If your running the game (i dont now about AC... never played it) over TCP/IP then all computers need an IP. If your using IPX (like starcraft) then i dont think you do... In any case, all computers on your network MUST have a different IP anyway.

 

[AL77]

Electric Amish, I do not know the answer to your question 100%, but I can relate to you that I set up ICS to work with two systems and was able to connect to the same server on both machines playing Quake3.

Here is my 'educated' guess.

Yes, the same public IP address (assigned to your sharing computer or server) will be communicated to the game server each time you connect with a machine in your network. The key thing here I believe is the name of your character. Logically, if you have a different game player name for each computer for which you plan on connecting to a particular game server, and if the server allows multiple accesses from the same IP, it should work. If the name is the same (although I've never tried this in Q3), it seems likely not to work as the game server has no way of knowing that there is in fact more than one computer attempting to play, unless of course the game server is able to do NAT (network address translation), but I doubt that.

As far as ICS is concerned, while not as full-featured as NAT32, it does have a basic firewall and has better security than if you weren't using a firewall at all.

 

[Electric Amish]

Yeah, things might also depend upon ports as well. I found a little NAT32 howto about assigning specific ports to connect on for AC. Hopefully that might work as well.

My cable will be installed on January 13th, so I'm just getting prepared.

amish