Odd Router behaviour

[oitin]

Hi everyone i have a D-Link Di-604-rev E and my LAN is acting quite odd. I've been trying to setup a few LAN games in my home but to no avail. My computers can access the internet just fine through my router, and all the computers can talk to the router, and my networked printer. HOWEVER none of my computers can ping each other. They are able to share files together but not able to connect to each other. I'm quite dumbfounded as to how fix this. thanks.

 

[Arin]

My guess is that your router is acting as a firewall and that, although normal windows filesharing ports are open and available to you internally, the ports that your games run on are being blocked. Yes, you're local, but technically when you're playing a networked game, it accesses that port on a router as if the traffic were coming from somewhere else on the internet.

There's a couple of possible solutions. The easiest is to unblock that port on your router, which would at least confirm for sure that the problem is what I think it is. Alternatively, you might try playing by IP connection to your 192.168.x.x IP if your game offers it, that sometimes works better than Local Network Gaming. My answer is kinda rudimentary, so someone out there may have more precise ideas too. It would help them if you threw out a particular game name as a "for instance".

Best of luck.

 

[oitin]

Well one of the games in particular would be Diablo II. The strange thing is we had the game working one day, and then the next, without anything being altered to my network, it just failed to connect directly to the ips. like 192.168.x.x for instance

 

[Arin]

And did you try opening ports 4000 and 6112?

 

[manarth]

Actually, a multiport router (at least almost all the SOHO ones) is simply a single port router attached to a switch in the same box. Which means that internal traffic is not subject to any routing issues - you are simply connected through a switch.

http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=62

"The DI-604 has an integrated 4-port switch with 10/100 Ethernet ports for directly connecting up to four computers."

Diablo II's site does not make it clear if multiplayer gaming across a LAN involves purely local networking, or requires a connection with Battle.net.

Check for firewalls on the LAN computers. (Windows XP has a built-in firewall). Some (usually older) games require a different protocol to TCP/IP: typically IPX.

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Marcus
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