For the love of all that is good in this world HELP ME!!!!!

[Jest]

I'm going insane. I've been doing my best to troubleshoot my network for a week or so with no luck. Basically I can't play Neocron because something is borked. Here is the post I made on the NC forums.

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I recently got DSL installed in the house and with that I bought a wireless base station and a wireless card for my comp. It was working really well for the first few days until another computer in the house also set up a wireless connection. Now everything is shot to hell.

It's odd because my connection is still fast. I can download stuff at the same speed I have always been able to, but it seems like the dsl is having a hard time switching between all the connections. For example I can't play Neocron. Half the time it tells me Server not found in the startup screen, the other half of the time it lets me log in for like 30 seconds before it starts syncing. Its the same for web pages. They either load instantly or don't load at all. Some times it loads like half of the images on the page too.

So first of all, what can I do to fix it? Did I set something up wrong? I'm new to wireless technology but I'm pretty sure this shouldn't be happening. I'll gladly answer any more questions that would help determining what I need to do. Its been driving me insane I haven't been able to play Cron for this entire week and I even reformated my computer to see if I could properly set it up.

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Further post answering some questions

Ok the base station I'm using is a Microsoft MN-700 wireless g base station. I checked to see if encryption is on and its not. Hmm dunno what other information might be helpful. I checked port filtering and no ports are being blocked or anything.

Under wireless mode its set to "mixed b compatible," though I have the option to change it to "g performance." Hmmm I guess I should change it to g but would that really result in fixing my problems? Oh and the check box for "Broadcast wireless network name" is selected, but I have no idea what that means. hehe. Let's see... also its set to dynamically obtain an IP address and the DNS number is obtained automatically. Should I enter in the DNS address manually if I know it? How often do ISPs change that cause I think I wrote the number down last time I talked to tech support.

Ok and then just in case in matter my wireless card is a LinkSys wireless-g card but I don't think that would really matter.



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I know all you FA guys are friggin technical geniuses so maybe you can help a guy out. I'm getting really pissed off since I have only been in game once in the last two weeks.

[HusK]

Just wondering, did you by any chance forward the neocron port to your neocron pc?

Your wireless station is also a router you see.

Let me explain what a router basicly is and does:

It is like a small pc, it is connected to the internet using your adsl connection, your pc's on the other hand are not connected to the internet but are connected to that router ( your wireless station ).
What happends is your pc requests to view a page, the router then creates a connection to the page you want to view but instead of it opening whatever you requested, it forwards the information(packets) to your pc, which creates the illusion you are on the internet. ( on the other hand thats how the internet basicly works, forwarding information from router to router, from repeater to repeater, from etc etc. so maybe it shouldn't be called an illusion by me )

This works because the router remembers what pc requested what information, a link is established for a short while, some programs however keep sending you information after that withoud your pc requesting it again, it happends alot that a router then doesn't know anymore where that information needs to go, because your pc actualy didn't request it, at such a time the router simply drops the packets into the void.

The sollution to this is to create whats called a "tunnel"
Basicly that means that you create a rule to ALWAYS forward any packets on a certain port towards a certain pc.

For neocron the standart port is 7000, if you forward any packets on that port the the pc your running neocron on you should not have any problems, to use more neocron's on different pc's you will have to define different ports for those neocron installations.
Do this by adding the following to neocron.ini
LOCALPORT="700x" where x defines any number thats not used yet.

the easy way to create a rule withoud any fuss is to stop using a dhcp server and have static ip's for your pc, but remember you will have to add every information to your network by hand then, meaning the default gateway ( which is the ip of your router ) and the IP's of the (usualy two) DNS servers of your internet connection ( you need those to resolve names like www.techhaven.org to there actualy IP adress)
Why I suggest this is because you need to be sure that your pc always has the same ip that the tunnel was made on, and you can't be 100% certain of that when using the dhcp server.

So in short get the following done:'

• Give your pc's the network settings it normaly gets by dhcp, and then disable the dhcp on your wireless station.
• Create a rule to forward any information on port 7000 ( or other ) to your neocron pc ( i.e. 123.456.789.321:7000 -> 192.168.1.1:7000 )

How you do this you'll have to look up in your wireless station manual or you'll have to find out by hand, wireless stations and the like usualy have what looks like a webpage to configure them, and that looks different on every brand and model. Other than that they usualy have telnet running on them where you can also add the much needed rule.

[hendrix]

I know it sounds silly, but this is the first thing anyone will say to you about your problem if it is a networking problem, are you sure all the correct drivers installed on each of the computers hosting the wireless technology.

How do you get the internet connection out to other computers? Does it come in the phone line then into a modem in/outside one of the pc's then the out to the other computers, if so where in the chain is your computer for neocron or is it happening on all of the computers?

If the problem is only happening on your computer I think it could be a possible network failure somewhere along the line, most probably on your computer as that pins you as the person having the problem.

On the other hand if the 2 "slaves" (the 2 or more computers connected to the "master" (the computer with the net connection) are having problems I would guess the master computer is having the problems as only the other two computers aren't working propperly internet wise.

Are you using a router? then dont ask me I dont use one.

I've never used wireless lan but I cant really see it being a problem apart from are the computers your using in range on the signal being sent from the one computer to the other and there is no 3 inch thick lead lined walls are there

This could be all useless im only learning at college so I dont have a wide base of knowledge yet.

oh and one other thing to set up the networks if you are using win2000 or XP make sure you use the networking wizard to set up your computers, just follow the step by step instructions and it will show you examples in picture form if you are not sure, so just use that if in doubt.



I know this may all sound a bit simple and stupid but it's the only thing I can think of at the moment.

Rento Webex

[HusK]

I know it sounds silly, but this is the first thing anyone will say to you about your problem if it is a networking problem, are you sure all the correct drivers installed on each of the computers hosting the wireless technology.

Can't be those because he can actualy view webpages, its just neocron and most likely some other programs that he doesn't know about that don't work

How do you get the internet connection out to other computers? Does it come in the phone line then into a modem in/outside one of the pc's then the out to the other computers, if so where in the chain is your computer for neocron or is it happening on all of the computers?

Yeah I'd like to know what happends before the wireless station, is there a adsl modem involved or is the wireless station also the adsl modem? Is there a 3rd pc involved being connected to the adsl modem or is every pc wireless connected?
I suppose the ADSL modem is directly connected to your wireless station, and if it is it most likely means you need to make rules on your adsl modem to forward packets on certain ports aswell as make those rules on your wireless station.

If the problem is only happening on your computer I think it could be a possible network failure somewhere along the line, most probably on your computer as that pins you as the person having the problem.

Not likely as everything else works fine, with him refering to high speed I realy think he can download alot on highspeed already which rules out any failures in the "line."

Are you using a router? then dont ask me I dont use one.

He is most definatly using a router, everyone with more than 1 pc connected trough one internet connection(read: one IP given by provider) has a router, some use their pc as router, some use there adsl modem as router, some use a dedicated server as router, some use a router as router...makes sence huh
Anyway to have more than one pc use one connection you need something routing the packets, thats the router

oh and one other thing to set up the networks if you are using win2000 or XP make sure you use the networking wizard to set up your computers, just follow the step by step instructions and it will show you examples in picture form if you are not sure, so just use that if in doubt.

I realy don't advise using this, you want to be 100% sure of every setting you made to your connection, if you use a wizard you'll have more time tracking down what changes it makes to the system than when you just do it yourselve, not to mention that wizards don't often do things cleanly, so to speak.

My first gues is that there are two routing devices connected, one being the adsl modem and the other being the wireless station, to create the tunnel I mentioned in my earlier post you'll have to create the same rule for the adsl modem, but in its case give it the ip of the wireless station offcourse.

The output of the rule would then become:
123.123.123.123:7000 > 192.168.1.1:7000 > 192.168.1.10:7000
Which means: internetIP:port > wirelessStationIP:port > connectedpcIP:port

[Jest]

Cool I'll test some of those suggestions tonight.

[HTEC9900]

Looks like quite a few bases have been covered here. I'll toss in my 2 cents:

- I am behind a Linksys router (yes I don't have a spiffy Cisco one to play with yet) and do not need to forward ports to my PC in order to play Neocron. Your wireless router / access point should function in a similar fashion. I have had a few other programs that did require manual port forwarding to work, but Neocron was not one of them. (This assumes that only one copy of Neocron is being used behind the firewall).

- If DHCP is enabled for the clients on your network, ignore the following. IP address conflict if your PCs are given static IP addresses?

- Microsoft hardware? Sounds like trouble to me. /sarcasm

[HusK]

you honoustly believe microsoft makes the hardware with their logo on by themselves?

They probably do design em tho...looking at how crappy design the got lol.

I've never used a linksys router before but could be that it doesn't need port forwarding, I use a very old version of IPTABLES on my linux server atm, which is quite inteligent already but offcourse things like that improve in time. Routers usualy use iptables or ipchains.

I've tested my setup on various brands, including one of the most expensive (and loved) intel and 3com routers, linksys swiches have been fairly troublesome thus I never even waste money on their routers, but sounds to me that those are infact okay... or is that like 'Trust' okay? meaning you never know what you get...

Cisco offcourse is one of the biggest around, but you hardly see them at peoples home, they are more directed towards the medium/large businesses. The company I worked for had a few jobs for Nato which required a combination of intel and Cisco routers but unfortunatly that was when neocron was still in its beta 2 days...at a time I never even heard of the game lol.

Anywayz keep in mind most routers DO need port forwarding for neocron, and a wireless station is indeed a router, the question that remains is if thats the only router being used...