ASDL Router problem with gaming sites

[beergoggles12]

I have a BT Voyager 205 router and cannot play flight simulator games on MSN Game zone site.
Keep getting an error message "DP2 Error problem".

I have tried so far:-
1) Turning off firewall - no sucess
2) Spoke 5 times to the ISP - complete waste of time.
2) Sighting microsoft website for help - they have a posting on the problem but no no solution.

I have been told a) the BT Voyager 205 ADSL Router will not allow you to forward enough ports, to run MSN Game Zone, b)I should try using the DMZ portion of this router if it is available and c) Alternatively I can try switching the router to bridged mode.

What does points a) b) and c) mean and how do i configure my router to get it to work. The help on the router website
does not advise how to undetake changes.
PLEASE HELP

 

[cyberspace]

Hi there.

To answer your questions in simple terms:

a) Port Forwarding:

When you are using a router, you have an extra device layer between your PC and the internet. When you just use a BT modem, your machine has direct communication with the internet. To give an example...your rotuer has the internal IP address 192.168.1.1, your PC has the address 192.168.1.2, and you are using an application that uses, lets say, port 3000. When the connection is made with the application, it's your router's external IP that will be used (as assigned by your ISP). So traffic on port 3000 arrives at your routers external interface. Port forwarding can let you create a rule, that will be along the lines of "when traffic arrives at <external IP of router> on port 3000, forward to local machine with address 192.168.1.2" This is commonly used to speed up applications such as bit torrent.

(More techy info than you may need) > Think of it as a tunnel through the firewall directly to your local machine. Your router will probably be using something called Network Address Translation (NAT) - this allows multiple private IP addresses to use 1 external public address - so the port forwarding allows the service using a public address to access a privately addressed machine, in this case, your PC.

b) DMZ:

This stands for "De-Militarized Zone" and basically fully opens up a machine inside a local network to full, unrestricted 2-way access to the internet. If you were running a web server, or a gaming server or such like, you may well use a DMZ. From a security perspective, you certainly do NOT want to put your own PC into a DMZ and this should definatley not be necessary to play your flight sim.

c) Bridged Mode:

Actually not too sure what this means to be honest, I probably should know the meaning...however there is "Router mode" and "Bridged Mode" and about as much as I know is that Router mode is the more reliable of the two. I'm sure somebody else can help better on this one.

- Did your router come free when you subscribed to BT broadband? You should be able to log into the router (type its ip address into Internet Explorer, eg,

http://192.168.0.1.

There should be a section on firewall rules where you can add the port that your game uses.

You may wish to consider upgrading to a better piece of kit if it won't work, they can be had for fairly cheap.

hope you get it sorted.

Systems Administrator
BSc Network Computing, CCNA. Both in training!