January 19, 2005

Curious George: router confusion I'm trying to play a fairly basic cribbage game (http://www.cribbage.ca) with a friend online, and I suspect that our D-Link routers are fogging our IP addresses. We're also both using ZoneAlarm, and Windows XP on PCs. I know nothing of routers and firewalls and bears, oh my. Anybody have any idea how we can connect?
posted by fish tick 19 years ago
  • The answer is probably "port triggering" but I don't know enough about it to help you more than that. I do know you would need to find out what ports your router is blocking if there is a built in firewall in your router and/or turning off/allowing ports through ZoneAlarm could help. Might need more info like the exact brand of router you both use?
  • Step 1) Enable port forwarding on each DLink router. This allows a connection to the router to be passed through to your computer. Step 2) You shouldn't really need ZoneAlarm if you have a router, so disable this, or at least let the Cribbage game get through it (it should ask you to allow access to the internet for each new program.) Step 3) Connect to the IP address of the router on the correct port. This should forward the connection to your computer, allowing you to play. That is just off the top of my head, however, so I may be missing something.
  • ... I may be missing something. If your new to this you probably forgot to peg 2 for his heels.
  • First of all, you need to find out what inbound ports the game uses. I didn't see that info in a quick look-see at the site. Once you know that, you can use port forwarding to expose those ports to the internet. Port triggering is a fancy automatic mode for port forwarding; it doesn't always play nice with all applications, but it's really nifty when it works. Either way, you can read more about port forwarding, triggering, configuring these features for your own model of router here. loto is correct that you're probably pretty safe from the outside world behind a NAT firewall/router, but I wouldn't turn ZoneAlarm off, personally. If your PC were to become infected with spyware (riding piggy-pack on a game you downloaded from the web, for example), a software firewall is probably the fastest and surest way of detecting it.
  • Thanks, all- will try these tweaks soon. Thanks, freethought- it's usually His Nibs I miss.