Ok, here's the deal. I have my laptop and PC networked through a router to my DSL modem.

Could I, in theory, host a dedicated server with my laptop, and play on that server with my PC without screwing everything up?

Whatcha think?

uhm.. yes.

Odd...but true

No, I mean that OTHER people could play on as well, not just me

My dad's Pentium 266 was able to handle a Quake 3 (no "quake 3 sucks!" please) server, UT server, and Serious Sam server without a problem on a cable connection.

If your laptop is as fast, or faster than 266mhz, I don't see why you'd have any issues.

(in case it matters, it also had 80 megabytes of RAM.)

[ 11-19-2001: Message edited by: Suddar Williams ]

Most likely, it depends on how your router is set up. Most routers use something called a NAT firewall. In laymens terms, it means that the router is a middle man between your computers and the internet. If you ever played the game operator, you will know what I'm talking about. The computers behind the firewall tell the router something, and the router tells it to the net. If the net wants to reply to you, it talks to the router and the router tells you what the responce was. If you start the conversation, this is fine because the router knows who is talking to who.

The problem is that most people don't know you exist, they only know the router exists. When they try to start a conversation with you, they are talking to the router. When this happens the router doesn't know who to relay the message to, because it could either be the PC or the Laptop. When you are having a server, most people try to connect to you, which is a problem.

In technical terms, every computer needs a unique IP address on a network. If you have two computers, you need two diffrent IP addresses if they are to talk over TCP/IP. A lot of DSL services charge money for new IP addresses if you want more than one.

The router solves the problem of having to pay for two IP addresses. Your router will take up the internet IP and make a friewall. The router will give every computer behind the firewall an IP that only exists inside that little group of computers. In other words, if your router is 207.190.218.67, thats what the world sees. Computers behind the firewall would have 192.168.0.1, 192.168.0.2 and so on. The only IP the net sees is 207.190.218.67 . The othres only exist in the network. All the computers with 192.168.#.# addresses talk to 207.190.218.67 if they want to go on the net, 207.190.218.67 does stuff to their packets, and they can have conversations. However, if someone from the net trys to connect, they connect to 207.190.218.67 which is the router. They can't see any of the 192.168.#.# addresses because they are behind the firewall.

There are ways around this, but it requires some tweaking with ports.

Ok, now what does all this mean? People probably won't be able to connect to your server from the outside unless you do some tweaking. However, there is only one real way to see if there isn't a way around this - try it out. It if it works, great! You don't know for sure unless you try it. If it doesn't work, it'll be annoying to fix, but its probably fixable.

Hope this helps.

With my Linksys router/hub/firewall it allows what's called a DMZ. What this does is allow one of the computers to be open to the net for the exact purposes of serving online games like UT. What it does is when someone wants to access my IP address, all requests are routed directly to that computer.

What's really nice is, it also allows specific port routing too, so I can set port 80 (http) requests to go to my linux box, port 21 (ftp) requests to go to my laptop which I was playing with an FTP server, etc.

Tribes 2...

Sore subject for me.

Diadem covered this nicely.