[godzappa]

Argh!

Ok, I had bought a hub to share my cable modem with my new G4 and my older G4, both running OSX.2

However this wasnt a great setup, browsing within the LAN was really slow, and people who would connect to online games would get really awful lag, even on the same cable provider and same town.

So I bought a Belkin router, and set it up with the ports for the games pointing towards my DP 867 using a virtual server provided with the router.

Now this works to a point, my friend in the same town, running on the same ISP cable network, and now has virtually no ping, great. However, anyone else joining the game, is getting just as bad lag as when I had the hub, or worse.

Does this sound like a router setup problem? or do I in fact need diff. hardware? Should I buy a switch instead of the router and use it with the hub if need be?

I tried running the server on my DP 867 in a DMZ (not behind any router firewall) and not only did the lag not improve on other players connecting, it was also terrible for my friend on the same cable network.

If anyone has any suggestions I would be most greatful, this is driving me bonkers!

[ghporter]

Belkin's router, like most gateway routers, is a switch with a router connection to the outside world. In other words, the LAN side is a switch that is connected to the WAN side by a Network Address Translation router. I have a feeling that your problem comes from the NAT.

You said that your friend on the same ISP had problems when you set your computer in the DMZ. No offense meant here, but you did give that computer a static IP (manually set) didn't you? That's an easy slip to make (he said after finally realizing just a few minutes ago that he had had two devices with the same static IP on the same LAN for months!).

I haven't played with a Belkin router, but there are some things to think about that should be pretty common. The first, and most obvious is to make sure that nothing else on your game computer is trying to access the Internet, or for that matter, the LAN.

[godzappa]

Hi Glen

The G4s are connected to the router using DHCP and have the IPs assigned, of course when the G4 was set on DMZ, my friend just connected using the outside IP.

But once the DMZ was on the DP 867, he could connect, but the lag he got was the same (actually maybe worse) than when he used to connect when I just had the hub.

Once I added the port to the 'virtual server' settings on the router, and told the router to send incomings on that port to my DP 867, everyone was able to connect to the game server using the outside IP once the virtual server was set up, but everyone got the super lag except my friend, who got a perfect connection.

So I really have no idea what the problem is. I could see the problem with having just the hub sharing the connection, I could see having to assign the ports for the games to point to my server, but now it seems like only people connecting to my G4 using the same network (Cogeco cable here in Ontario) get a decent connection and everyone else gets an awful one.

For some reason though, when I disable NAT altogether, I cant get any internet connection at all.

James