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View Full Version : Port Forwarding.... A success story!



Gwydion
November 11th, 2016, 15:55
So, didn't know where else to post this but thought I would share. When I first purchased fantasy grounds I had port forwarding issues. I have both a modem and a wireless router, so two things to worry about! Did I say I'm not really a tech guy at all? After taking my internet down for a weekend trying to figure it out myself, I had a technician come out and he got everything to work.

Recently I upgraded my internet and was able to figure out how to log into the new modem and set up a virtual server to forward port 1802 to my apple airport extreme wireless router (which is already set up to forward to my machine). All great! Until last night. As I was getting ready to run a session of Princes of the Apocalypse my players informed me they could not log on to my server. Strange. I ran my test and the dreaded "failure" blinked red back at me. I shut down my twitch stream so I could troubleshoot.

I kept thinking it must be something easy! After talking to some of my players who are tech guys, going to the command prompt and typing ipconfig to see what returned, etc. I had an epiphany. Everything seemed to be working fine, it just seemed the port was not getting forwarded to my computer. So, I logged into my modem and found the internal ip address I was forwarding port 1802 to. I knew it should be forwarding to the apple extreme router and then from the router to my machine. I logged into my airport extreme and found that the internal ip address of my airport extreme had changed by 1! Instead of xxx.xx.x.2 it was now xxx.x.x.3! I logged into my modem and deleted the port forward I had set up and changed it to .3. Crossing my fingers I ran my fg test and..................... immediate success!

I was able to get in a slightly shortened session after this. I learned a little about "leasing" and that sometimes the system might find another internal ip address. Now, next time I can check this first!

Thanks for all the technical folks who post here and have given me more confidence to research and troubleshoot some of these issues myself! Thanks to anyone who actually read all this too! :)

Nylanfs
November 11th, 2016, 17:16
Horray!

Xydonus
November 11th, 2016, 18:32
Had the same problem before. Had to set it to my internal IP, even with port forwarding it didn't work until I did that. Was a real headache and a bloody nuisance at the time.

Gwydion
November 11th, 2016, 18:39
Had the same problem before. Had to set it to my internal IP, even with port forwarding it didn't work until I did that. Was a real headache and a bloody nuisance at the time.

Yeah. Sometimes its just nice to vent and know that it isn't just you that has struggled with some of these issues. Its nice when I can actually figure it out myself! It was not a pretty household here for the weekend when I quite literally took down our internet trying to port forward. My wife and two young daughters were not pleased at all! I guess netflix is not just a "nice to have" but a "need to have".... :)

Nylanfs
November 11th, 2016, 19:28
I guess netlix is not just a "nice to have" but a "need to have".... :)

Hand them a book, or a library card? :)

LordEntrails
November 11th, 2016, 19:32
One thing to look at, see if both on the modem and router you can assign a preferred/fixed IP to a given device. This way when you router reboots or your PC does or is off network for sometime, it will always get assigned the same IP, and you won't have to adjust your port forwarding in the future :)

Gwydion
November 11th, 2016, 19:34
One thing to look at, see if both on the modem and router you can assign a preferred/fixed IP to a given device. This way when you router reboots or your PC does or is off network for sometime, it will always get assigned the same IP, and you won't have to adjust your port forwarding in the future :)

What you say makes too much sense and is way above my paygrade.... :)

Gwydion
November 11th, 2016, 19:36
Hand them a book, or a library card? :)

Yes. They all got a lot of reading in that weekend!

rob2e
November 11th, 2016, 22:22
This one time, 'member? I was house sitting and I needed to play my regular game. And I had this same problem. I was double routed and didn't even realize it. 'Member? And then "damned" came to the rescue. He suggested he remote access into my machine and set it up for me. Fortunately I had all the passwords to the poeple's (my sister) router, modem, etc. He was a great help, we fixed it, I was able to have my game.

This is the greatest community in the known universe!

'Member?

Gwydion
November 11th, 2016, 22:25
This one time, 'member? I was house sitting and I needed to play my regular game. And I had this same problem. I was double routed and didn't even realize it. 'Member? And then "damned" came to the rescue. He suggested he remote access into my machine and set it up for me. Fortunately I had all the passwords to the poeple's (my sister) router, modem, etc. He was a great help, we fixed it, I was able to have my game.

This is the greatest community in the known universe!

'Member?

I do 'member!

rob2e
November 11th, 2016, 22:26
I do 'member!

'Member?

damned
November 11th, 2016, 22:38
Huzzah! Well done Gwydion :)

Nylanfs
November 12th, 2016, 00:53
I do 'member!

BTW while looking for something else I found where your name came from, cool mythos.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwydion

Gwydion
November 12th, 2016, 03:10
BTW while looking for something else I found where your name came from, cool mythos.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwydion

Thanks. I used it for the first character I ever created for AD&D back in the 80's.... :)