Loop Back

[evonitzer]

We are having trouble at my apartment with joining online games that are hosted by a computer on our network. My room mate thinks that we need a router with a "loop back" feature. However, I can't seem to find it under the feature comparison charts that are in all the tests I read. Is it generally an unimportant feature, so it isn't listed, or does it have another name? Does anyone know of a good router that has loop back or something like that so I don't have to do as much research? And lastly, are we looking for the wrong thing? Should our router work just fine, and we just have it configured wrong? Oh yea, our router is a Netgear Wireless Router MR814v2. On the recommendations part, we don't really need a wireless router, but it would be convenient. And 8 ports preferred. Thanks.

 

[cleverhandle]

"Loopback" in networking usually means an IP address that a computer uses to talk to itself. Typically, the "loopback interface" on a machine is 127.0.0.1. If your computer is sending traffic to that address, then that traffic isn't really going anywhere - the machine is only communicating with itself.

I haven't the faintest idea why a loopback interface would affect hosting games on your network. I strongly suspect that the router you currently have is perfectly fine, but needs better configuration. If you describe exactly what the problem is, I'm sure someone here will be able to help you out. At the moment, all we have is "trouble joining online games."

 

[evonitzer]

Ok, I'll describe what's going wrong. The problem is that none of us can host a game of Warcraft III and have others on the network join. We all lag like no other if we try playing, and I'm not sure why. We can play games over our lan just fine, and we can all join games that are hosted by someone else, but again, we lag if someone on our network hosts. Does that help? We think the loop back would help because it wouldn't send our info to b-net and back again, and instead treat us like a lan where we are, and just the host would connect to battlenet.

 

[cleverhandle]

Originally posted by: evonitzer
The problem is that none of us can host a game of Warcraft III [via Battlenet] and have others on the network join. We all lag like no other if we try playing, and I'm not sure why.

Because when the hosting machine connects to BNet, BNet doesn't see its internal (private) IP address, it sees the external IP of your router. Which is fine. But when the other machines connect to BNet, they're being told to connect to that external IP. I'm guessing that the router is expecting packets to be coming in from the outside world and isn't properly translating the ones that are coming from the other clients inside your LAN.

We can play games over our lan just fine...

Because then there's no translation going on. Everyone is happily using the private IP addresses.

...and we can all join games that are hosted by someone else...

Because then all the machines are sending packets out through the router to some other host. The router is still translating here, but it's getting packets from the direction it expects to receive them.

Does that help?

It helps me understand the problem, but I'm not sure it helps me tell you what to do. I'm surprised that you're even able to join the games at all - I would have thought that it would either work perfectly or not even connect at all. Searching around a bit, I see what your friend means - Linksys routers have a "loop back" feature that accounts for this kind of problem. Thing is that Netgear might also have the same feature, but with a different name. I took a quick browse at the manual for your model, but didn't see anything that jumped out at me. I'd guess that somebody with more experience with Netgear routers can help you better. I'm sure those people will come by here eventually...