Hosting Fantasy Grounds at college

[gohatwoono]

Hi, so I've been setting up a game to play with some friends while I'm at college. I'm using my college's wireless internet, which doesn't seem to allow me to connect due to the port not being open, and I doubt they'll just open the port if I ask them to. Do I have any options aside from asking them to open the port, or am I just out of luck?

[Griogre]

You will need to use an Virtual Private Network (VPN) like Hamachi. It use to have a free for personal use, but it looks like they changed that to free for 5 or 10 people (says 5 for trial and 10 in FAQ: https://secure.logmein.com/products/hamachi/ I mentoned Hamachi because I know people have used it here. Also, while you can GM over a wireless network they typically have a connection speed of about 1/10th to 1/1,000th of a wired connection so you are going to want to keep the your transfer sizes to a minimum.

[Andraax]

Also, while you can GM over a wireless network they typically have a connection speed of about 1/10th to 1/1,000th of a wired connection so you are going to want to keep the your transfer sizes to a minimum.

Depends on your equipment and setup. Attached is a speed test screen shot via wireless on my laptop.

For the OP's question, Google "free vpn" and pick one of them. Any of them should allow you to host a session.
4887

[dr_venture]

I use Hamachi for my games, and for the most part I have no problems. It actually comes in handy to have its built-in chat functionality to communicate easily with players outside of FG, especially when debugging FG problems. There is a 5 person limit per virtual network, but as far as I can tell there is no limit to the number of virtual networks you can create... so it's a bit of a hassle, but easy to work around: just create more networks.

[Blacky]

Also, while you can GM over a wireless network they typically have a connection speed of about 1/10th to 1/1,000th of a wired connection so you are going to want to keep the your transfer sizes to a minimum.
The cap isn't the wired connexion, it's the internet connexion. For a mom&pop DSL connexion (something most of us have), the real issue with wireless isn't speed (if the wireless isn't too ancient and near the computer), it's its reliability.

Especially since Fantasy Grounds sucks right now at handling network errors.

As for the initial question, did you try to launch FG with the port switching, like
-p 443 for example?

[Trenloe]

Regarding the OP - I'm guessing that it is not just a case of "opening a port", as the college more than likely will use internal (private) IP addresses (192.168.xx.yy, 172.16-31.xx.yy or 10.xx.yy.zz) for their onsite wireless and use NAT on their connection to the internet (router) for internet address translation. If this is the case, there would need to be port forwarding on the college router for port 1802 to the internal IP address of the FG PC (which could well change each time they connect to the network) - something that would be hard to manage even if the college IT department was willing to do the port forwarding.

In the unlikely event that the college doesn't use NAT and the client PCs on the wireless network have actual internet IP addresses then what Blacky suggests might work - try changing the port that FG connects on via the command line argument -pXXX (note there is no space between the -p and the XXX port number).

[Blacky]

It's worth a try.

And maybe they allow UPNP.

If all else fails, Hamachi or something similar might work (but read its manual before, it add and changes things to your OS, you might not like it).

The cleaner way is a TLS tunnel or VPN, but this require knowledge and probably some price.

[Trenloe]

Hi, so I've been setting up a game to play with some friends while I'm at college. I'm using my college's wireless internet, which doesn't seem to allow me to connect due to the port not being open, and I doubt they'll just open the port if I ask them to. Do I have any options aside from asking them to open the port, or am I just out of luck?
First step - start Fantasy Grounds, click "Load Campaign". If the "Internal" address in the top right is something like 192.168.xx.yy or 10.xx.yy.zz or 172.16-31.xx.yy (with xx, yy and zz being a number between 1 and 254) then your college is using private IP addresses on their wireless LAN and NAT (network address translation) to connect everyone to the internet. Usually, if you have access to the router you can setup port forwarding you can configure the network so that FG can communicate with the outside world, but this would require your college IT to do this configuration. I'm guessing that as you can't connect when you have tried UPnP is not enabled on the college router (they'd have very open security if this was the case). So, options are - get college IT to do the port forwarding for port 1802 to the IP address of your PC (unlikely and they'd have to change it every time your PC got a new IP address) or use a VPN solution such as Hamachi (this is used by a number of FG GMs).