FG Knowledge Base - Firewalls
I've had in my mind to make a community-driven knowledge database to help people to configure their firewalls for Fantasy Grounds. This is not a complete tutorial on networking for Fantasy Grounds, but it's a start. My hopes are that the devs make this thread sticky so that new users can find it easy, and that all other users in this community make similar entries about their firewalls. Also, please keep this thread as clean a possible, thank you!
I'll start by making the first entry, to show what I had in mind and to set a template for other entries.
Step 1: Setting a static IP-address
**NOTE: The screenshots in this section are from a swedish OS. If someone could provide me with similar screenshots but from an english OS that would be greatly appreciated. Mail the screenshots to: crusader (a) harn (dot) se. Thanks!
This is writen from the perspective of using a hardware firewall/router, and it is something that only the DM/GM need to do. The reason to set a static IP is that the firewall needs to know what IP it should forward the incoming requests from the players to.
If you do not have a hardware firewall/router, or a xDSL- or cable-modem that also acts as a firewall, then you shouldn't set a static IP.
Open a DOS-prompt and type
This will show you your current IP-configuration, and it will give you most of the information that you need:
https://www.harn.se/img/fgdb/0_1_dos_prompt.jpg
What you need to configure on your PC is:
- IP-address
- Subnet mask
- Default gateway
- DNS-server
The ipconfig-command gives you all this information except the IP-address. To know what IP-address to use you need to look at the subnet mask. This shows which of the octets in the IP-address identifies the subnet, and those octets are fixed.
So in the example above, the subnet mask is 255.255.255.0 which means that 192.168.1 is fixed and 3 is the part that we can change. To know what we can change to we need to find the DHCP-scope of the firewall. Find out how to do this in the firewall-tutorials below. The scope consists of those addresses that the firewall can hand out dynamically, so you shouldn't use any of those addresses.
Example:
The DHCP-scope of the firewall is 192.168.1.3 to 192.168.1.51. When we choose an address, given that the subnet mask is 255.255.255.0 and the default gateway (the IP-address of the firewall) is 192.168.1.1 - it means that we can use 192.168.1.2 or 192.168.1.52 to 192.168.1.254.
Say for instance that we choose the address 192.168.1.200. Open up the setting for the network interface:
https://www.harn.se/img/fgdb/0_2_nic_properties.jpg
Select the 'Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)' entry and click properties:
https://www.harn.se/img/fgdb/0_3_ipaddress.jpg
Instead of assigning the address dynamically, configure the PC of using the IP-address that you have chosen as static IP. Make sure that the netmask, gateway and DNS-server is exactly the same as listed by the ipconfig-command above. Click OK and OK, and make sure that you still can connect to the Internet.
Step 2: Configuring the firewall
NOTE: If you don't find your particular brand of firewall below, look at the examples here and see if you can figure it out. Otherwise, post a new thread about it and we'll try to sort things out. If you have a working configuration, please add to this thread following the same format as below to show others how you configure that particular firewall.