Hosting Behind A Router?

[Spacepain]

Is is feasible to host or play from behind a router? I and several friends would like to be able to play against eachother, but we all have routers. We've tried PBEM, but we've hated it.

[ March 11, 2004, 17:05: Message edited by: Spacepain ]

[Norfleet]

Totally possible. Dominions II uses only a simple, straightforward TCP/IP connection. Just forward the port you're hosting Dominions II on, and it'll work perfectly. You don't even really need fancy routing, even a crude relay daemon would do the job.

[Unwise]

To expand a bit, “port forwarding” is an operation in which you open a port in your router’s firewall and any traffic that comes into that port gets sent to a specified machine. It is set up in your router’s configuration page.

It should ask you to specify the IP of the machine that you want the forwarding to go to, which might mean that you have to turn DHCP off.

You then set up the server on the machine and set the port number to be the port that you just opened. When the server comes up, it will identify itself as having the IP of your computer (e.g., 192.168.0.101), but that is not the IP you want to give your friends – give them the IP of the router.

Incidentally, this is only needed for hosting – contacting a server does not require doing anything to your router.

[PhilD]

Additional comment, since I asked a similar question a few weeks ago, and got it explained to me: when connecting from inside your LAN, you'll have to use the LAN IP adress of the server, not the outside IP of the router.

Here's an example: my router IP is 123.456.789.012 (yes, I know it's bogus), and my computer is 192.168.0.243 on the LAN. On my router, I setup port forwarding from, say, port 11111 to IP 192.168.0.243, port 10000.

On my home computer, the server runs on port 10000. If I want to connect to it from the same computer, I use IP 192.168.0.243, port 10000.

If some friend from outside has to connect, he'll use IP 123.456.789.012, port 11111.

[Spacepain]

Awsome! Thanks... are certain ports more appropriate for forwarding than others?

[Argitoth]

Originally posted by Spacepain:
Awsome! Thanks... are certain ports more appropriate for forwarding than others? <font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Yes, don't forward 1337 unless you are one of them types...

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by Argitoth:
Yes, don't forward 1337 unless you are one of them types... <font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Heh. Yes, I remember we *TRIED* making the game run on port 31337, but players were unable to connect because of their firewalls automatically blocking that port for some unknown reason.