internal-external ip address

[Firstright]

I have a 3 comp network in my home . All comps can see each other as well as browse the internet , but my problem is this , I and we like to play multiplayer games on the internet . When we try to create a game or enter a created game made by someone else their computers cannot find our games and they cannot ours ??? So the problem GameSpy said our internal address was different from our external address . How can I change the internal address which I guess my router has to the external address given by my isp which is static ? I tried to disable NAT as suggested by router book but when I disable it none of the comps can access the internet and also I turned off the firewall but to no avail . I know it`s a router issue because I can connect the host comp straight to the cable modem and have no problems finding games or entering games by ip address.
My ISP is no help at all so if anyone can please give me the solution to this problem I would greatly appreciate it .
Thx

 

[hexn]

The problem is, in order to be on the internet, you have to have a PUBLIC ip address. Your computers at your house probably have an IP that starts with 192 or 10 or 172. These are PRIVATE ip addresses and are not useable on the internet.

So, in order for your computers to surf the net, the router will switch out your private IP for it's public IP. When you disable NAT, you disable that process.

When you connect your computer to the modem and not the router, your computer then gets the public ip, which is why everything works that way.

If all your computers MUST have public IPs, then your only solution is to call your ISP and buy a few more IPs from them. It will cost you a little more per month, but there is no other solution.

 

[KimLeece]

If you only want to use one computer inside your network as an access point for outside requests then you can do it by port forwarding (the port or ports to be forwarded depend on what the games are using to connect to each other) You do this from the router setup. You need to know the internal IP address of the computer you are going to reach - then in the router setup allow incoming requests on any given port to be sent to that address on the same port. That will link your WAN IP address to your LAN IP on the ports that have been mapped. If you have a dynamic IP (changes whenever you log in) you can also use a free service from:

http://www.no-ip.com

which enables you to assign a name to your WAN address - you download a small utility from their site and it keeps a check on your real external IP address and updates the name on the DNS severs. This will work for one computer - if you need to have all three independently available for the games then you will need more external IP's as inikis said - you need one real IP for each computer you link independently to the web. Of course you only need the one IP to let all the computers share the web connection - but that won't allow more than one player on the ported computer to actually play.

Kim Leece