Tried to share the benefits of my new ADSL connection by hosting on VROC
last night. Couldn't do it, although I had no difficulty joining races and
had pings as low as 118.
As I motored around Silverstone, waiting for someone to show up and thinking
that perhaps I had The Black Plague, I realized that there must be something
wrong. Not wanting to interrupt the session, I went to VROC on another PC
(also on my LAN, BTW) and there was my host...with a few interesting twists:
1. The VROC Open Room 1 showed my host, but with a host name of "J. Driver"
rather than the name that was in my VROC setup. I knew the host shown was
mine because my unique comment was displayed.
2. Although, I had been in my practice session for several minutes, the
status remained "Starting", although I was refreshing my VROC screen
continuously.
3. No Circuit or Race entries were displayed in VROC.
4. No "Join" was displayed.
I'm thinking that the problem might have to do with the fact that I have a
multihomed PC (two network cards, two IP addresses). Can anyone explain what
was happening here/confirm this as a bug/offer a workaround?
Also discovered one definite bug, though I'm sure it's been discussed here:
When selecting a VROC host in the GPL address book, the "Connect Via"
selection automatically changed to my LAN IP address from my Internet IP
address. Clicking on the green flag, without noticing the change in the
"Connect Via" selection, leads to non-stop timeout errors...until you
discover what the problem is! Similar behavior when attempting to host
probably accounts for the difficulty I had hosting as well.
Are you using some sort of proxy software or network address translation on
your gateway PC (the one that is connected to the net via ADSL and your
internal LAN)? I have a similar setup (using Nevod's NAT1000) and I had to
configure the software to not use the UDP ports that GPL uses for
multiplayer over TCP.
Since the network address translation S/W uses TCP/UDP port numbers for
address translation, I had to configure NAT to not use the dedicated UDP
port numbers that GPL uses (32766 and 6971). For NAT1000, I added the
following lines to a configuration file (nat1000.cfg):
UDP:32766:0.0.0.0:NORMAL
UDP:6971:0.0.0.0:NORMAL
I can host or join races from the gateway and join races from the internal
PC.
Good luck
Brian
>I'm thinking that the problem might have to do with the fact that I have a
>multihomed PC (two network cards, two IP addresses). Can anyone explain what
>was happening here/confirm this as a bug/offer a workaround?
No. But I did discover that it pays to read the VROC technical notes when
having technical problems! :-0
Here's what they have to say about multihomed machines:
------
Multihomed Machines
Machines with two IP addresses are known as "multihomed". If your machine is
attached to a LAN and to the Internet, and you are running TCP/IP on the
LAN, it is a multihomed machine.
If your machine is multihomed, Java may report your LAN IP address instead
of your Dialup Networking (or other Internet) IP address.
As of VROC Beta 3f, the applet addresses this by retrieving a list of all IP
addresses belonging to your machine. It ignores nonroutable IP addresses,
including those in the ranges 192.168.*.* (most commonly used in home and
other small LANs) and 10.*.*.*. and picks the other. If there are multiple
routables, it takes the last one it finds.
If I hear enough cries of dismay, I'll make the applet ignore nonroutables
in the range of 172.16.*.* through 172.31.*.*.
If, despite this, VROC is still reporting an incorrect IP address, you can
enter the correct IP address in the IP Address Override field in VROC Setup.
Note: If you formerly used VROC Setup to override the IP address on a
multihomed machine, you might like to delete the override and see if the
applet now correctly reports your Internet IP address.
------
Guess I'll have to give the IP Address Override field a try. Though I think
I might have already tried that.
