LAN Party Assistance

[austin2118ace]

This weekend I am planning on having 3 friends over for a minilan. In preparation I had one of the friends come over today so we could attempt to test the switch, a Netgear FS108.

 

However, we ran into some problems. I disabled my WIFI, and we both connected to the switch. Neither of our PC's would connect to the other for any of our games. Also, we couldn't even ping the other machine. We completely disabled all of our firewalls and are at a complete loss as to why nothing will work.

We do not want any internet connection, because I have a really slow connection, hence disabling the WIFI-- to avoid conflicts.

 

Eventually after changing the IPV4 addresses on our ethernet ports we were able to successfully ping the other machine, but the games still would not work.

 

Am I missing something? We are wishing to play Borderlands 2, PAYDAY 2, Left 4 Dead 2, Arma 3, and Minecraft.

We tested all 5 and not a single one would connect.

Note: L4D2 and Payday 2 require some third party workarounds for mp to work.

 

Thank You,

Austin

 

[ApolloX75]

FS108 is an "unmanaged" switch. In all the many LANs I used to host, these gave me no end of grief.

 

I found I could never get them to work right without a router to handle the traffic, or one system acting as a router. I used managed "smart" switches a lot like my good ol' Linksys SD216 to fix a lot of LAN party woes.

[austin2118ace]

8 minutes ago, ApolloX75 said:

FS108 is an "unmanaged" switch. In all the many LANs I used to host, these gave me no end of grief.

 

I found I could never get them to work right without a router to handle the traffic, or one system acting as a router. I used managed "smart" switches a lot like my good ol' Linksys SD216 to fix a lot of LAN party woes.

How do I make one of the systems act as a router? I don't have a way to purchase a managed switch so I will have to improvise for the time being.

[Jacktastic-Mofo]

That's pretty odd, I typically just connect a bunch of PC's to either of my two switches which are connected to my home router and everything works. If nothing you try works set up your servers through portforwarding and have all your friends connect to it, performance should be pretty good.

[austin2118ace]

4 minutes ago, Jacktastic-Mofo said:

That's pretty odd, I typically just connect a bunch of PC's to either of my two switches which are connected to my home router and everything works. If nothing you try works set up your servers through portforwarding and have all your friends connect to it, performance should be pretty good.

We can't connect the switch to the home router. There isn't enough space in the room, or near it, to hold 4 rigs comfortably. Nor Do I have a long enough Ethernet cable to run downstairs to the switch. Any solutions?

[ApolloX75]

29 minutes ago, austin2118ace said:

How do I make one of the systems act as a router? I don't have a way to purchase a managed switch so I will have to improvise for the time being.

Asking me to remember a lot *grumble* :P.

 

Okay when you assigned the addresses, did you make sure to set the Subnet Mask to 255.255.255.0? It's also best to keep your IP addresses simple and sequential "192.168.0.1", "192.168.0.2", etc etc.

 

You shouldn't need to assign a Gateway address or DNS as a router is not present and they may just cause problems anyways. In sharing options make sure you remove password protected sharing, and you can set it up to use User Accounts instead of having Windows manage the account connections which with 7, 8 and 10 means it tries to use a Homegroup. Another issue I used to run across was the default Workgroup was always set to "WORKGROUP" and often caused issues (mind you this was Windows XP) and setting it to "MSHOME" often solved little connection woes.

 

*Edit: For the Gateway, you can assign an address in the same range as the systems, but that refers to a system not physically present. Some programs require the address to be present, but not an actual connection. I would try and run some games without the Gateway address present first. So anyways you'd set it up like this for the first system:

 

IP Address: 192.168.0.2

Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0

Default Gateway: 192.168.0.1

 

And then set it up the same way on each system in sequence, only changing the number in red. So system two would be 192.168.0.3, and so on.

 

That's as much as I can remember at the moment, but if I remember some more specifics I'll post them.

 

stupid Windows and the stupid handholding making me forget everything *grumble*

Edited February 24, 2016 by ApolloX75
Added more info

[austin2118ace]

28 minutes ago, ApolloX75 said:

28 minutes ago, ApolloX75 said:

*snip*

*snip*

 

I have tried what you suggested, but I now how stumbled across another issue.

 

I currently have two systems connected to the switch: System A and B

The Subnet for both is 255.255.255.0 and the Gateway is 192.168.0.1 for both.

 

System A's I.P. is 192.168.0.2 and System B is 192.168.0.3

 

I can ping System B from System A, but I can not ping A from B.

Also, System A does not show up in the network section in windows (where you can share files,etc.)

 

All of the sharing settings are turned on, not sure why it isn't showing up?

[ApolloX75]

24 minutes ago, austin2118ace said:

 

I have tried what you suggested, but I now how stumbled across another issue.

 

I currently have two systems connected to the switch: System A and B

The Subnet for both is 255.255.255.0 and the Gateway is 192.168.0.1 for both.

 

System A's I.P. is 192.168.0.2 and System B is 192.168.0.3

 

I can ping System B from System A, but I can not ping A from B.

Also, System A does not show up in the network section in windows (where you can share files,etc.)

 

All of the sharing settings are turned on, not sure why it isn't showing up?

Hmm. Make sure under Advanced Sharing you have: Network Discovery on (Private and Public), Sharing on (obvious, I know), and under All Networks have Public Sharing on, make sure both systems are identical. Just some basic settings to double check really.

 

If you swap the ethernet cables around does the problem stay the same or change?

[austin2118ace]

9 minutes ago, ApolloX75 said:

*snip*

Somehow I fixed the problem, all the settings were identical. I just unplugged the ethernet and plugged it back in. No Idea why that fixed it, but somehow it did. I am going to test a simple game, such as minecraft and see if it will work.

I also added a third pc, all three can ping each other successfully.