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[Mark_Cherry]

Hi Russell,

I do my MP flying on our VA's host but I'd still like to run my own one, possibly as an emergency backup.

Now, this probably sounds like a silly reason but it's also so that my old PC (400Mhz Pentium) has an additional reason to stay switched on other than having a printer hooked to it, which I have no space for in this room. Also, I don't want to run FS2004 and FSH on the same machine and only the new PC is capable of running FS2004.

My two PC's are linked in the simplest type of LAN arrangement - crossover cable, no hub and ICS (shudder) to link them both to the internet. So far, I have only got it as far as the port 80 error message on the old PC.

I can OPEN port 80 in the firewall on the new PC, which has the ADSL connection, but I cannot work out how to FORWARD port 80 to the other one, as described in the router discussions, elsewhere.

Am I misunderstanding the terminology here? What is the difference between granting port 80 access to the outside world and forwarding traffic to a PC, within the LAN?

I think I've seen it stated that FSHost MUST be run on the PC which holds the internet connection. So this is really asking why that is?

Put another way, what is the IP address of my secondary machine, as far as the internet is concerned, or is it entirely invisible to outside users, because of the 192.168.0.x address? Even with port 80 opened, I suspect this is why the master server cannot get the webpage from it.

Any thoughts?

[Russell Gilbert]

Hi Mark,

When you allow access to port 80 in your firewall on the internet pc, it allows traffic to get in, but only to the internet pc.  If you want that traffic to get to the internal pc, you need to forward that port somehow.

If you're using XP, you can setup a port forward in the firewall settings.  Note that the forward is active even if the firewall itself is disabled.  Normally the internal pc would be invisible because of the 192.168 address, but the forward gets around this problem.

FSHost can be run on either machine, there's no limitation as far as that goes -- it just gets more complicated if you put it on the internal pc, because some of the ports you need to forward (see the Help page) are in a range, and XP's firewall doesn't let you add a range of ports.  If you had a router, it'd be easier to forward the entire range, but personally I think it's easiest if you use ICS and then run FSHost on the internet pc.

Russell

[Mark_Cherry]

Hi Russell,

thanks for the reply.

When you say 'see the help page' (about forwarding) do you mean one of the FSH help pages or Windows Help, w.r.t. Firewall configuration?

In all my poking around in Windows menus, I can't say I've encountered anything about port forwarding but I will take another look. Mcafee doesn't offer this kind of facility, afaics.

Even though not the best way to do it, it's the sort of thing I'd like to try, purely for the sake of the challenge. Setting up 100 individual forwards for the 2300-2400 range doesn't sound like fun though :-LOL

Setting up the host in the directly connected PC is the common sense way to do it but one of my VA cohorts was running FSH in this way and said he suffered a notable performance hit in FS2004. I'd like to avoid that, if possible.

Then again, I don't know what hardware he was running at the time. This is a P4 3.06Ghz, so the CPU power is there. However, the connection is 512 (64k) ADSL and that sets the real performance limit. If I'm running a host in the background but I happen to be flying MP in an external host, the peer-to-peer business means that there would, in effect, be two lots of bandwidth demand on the single connection and both hosts might suffer due to that, no?

[Russell Gilbert]

When you say 'see the help page' (about forwarding) do you mean one of the FSH help pages or Windows Help, w.r.t. Firewall configuration?

I meant the FSHost help page, in the section about ports and firewalls:

http://www.chocolatesoftware.com/fshost/?help#ports

To setup forwarding in the XP firewall, go to Control Panel / Network Connections, right-click on the internet connection, select properties, go to the Advanced tab, and click the Settings button at the bottom.  If this button is grayed out, turn on the firewall with the top checkbox first.  Note that the forwards you setup with the Settings button are active even if you turn off the checkbox for the whole firewall.

Setting up the host in the directly connected PC is the common sense way to do it but one of my VA cohorts was running FSH in this way and said he suffered a notable performance hit in FS2004. I'd like to avoid that, if possible.

Then again, I don't know what hardware he was running at the time. This is a P4 3.06Ghz, so the CPU power is there. However, the connection is 512 (64k) ADSL and that sets the real performance limit. If I'm running a host in the background but I happen to be flying MP in an external host, the peer-to-peer business means that there would, in effect, be two lots of bandwidth demand on the single connection and both hosts might suffer due to that, no?

As for the CPU issue, I've never seen a significant usage from FSHost itself, and I often host sessions on the same 2GHz machine that I'm running FS2004 on.  With a 3Ghz machine, I'm sure you'd be fine.

As for the bandwidth, yes, you're correct, if you're hosting a session and also flying in a separate session on the net, you'll be taking twice the bandwidth hit.  With only a 64KB line, you may have problems with more than a couple of people in each session.

Russell

[Mark_Cherry]

Hi Russell,

okay, back to the FAQ again  , then ploughing through the XP connection/firewall settings menus one more time.  :-/

Again, something of a labour of love and for no better reason than to prove it can be made to work that way.

What I should have said earlier is that the older PC I was intending to keep occupied by running a host is a Win 98, 400Mhz, 320Mb RAM. I should have enough issues with just the XP/Win98/ICS combo, I suppose. The old 'un might start to creak at some stage but it is a very stable machine, compared to the XP one (on which I've seen BSoDs). Pity it doesn't have the memory or CPU power to cope well with an XP install (not that I'd bother with the extra expense anyway). Interestingly, it accepted the upgrade to DX9.0b with no hiccups. I'm all set, bar the firewall business.

As you pointed out, since it's CPU overhead rather than graphics capabilities which I should have to worry about and the CPU is plenty fast enough, my best bet, in the long term is to host on the XP machine but just keep an eye on the bandwidth issue.

Thanks once again.