Hey, I was wondering if someone could help me out with this:
Out of curiosity, I decided to see what Marathon netplay was like now that I'm DSL'd, but quickly discovered that I probably had some kind of firewall/NAT thing going, causing gathering to be an immense failure and joining to cause crashes, or at least hangs. (I have to say I wasn't aware of it, but, hey moving on...)
The troubleshooting guide told me this:
I'm trying to join an Internet game. The gatherer sees me on the list, but cannot add me; the gatherer's A1 hangs up for a long time (about 60 seconds) then finally claims it couldn't find me on the network - that maybe I cancelled. I didn't!
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This is the classic symptom for the joiner being behind a firewall or NAT device (such as an internet connection sharing router) and not having that firewall or NAT properly configured to pass through A1 game traffic to the joining computer. Please see the section of the Networking User's Guide about dealing with NAT and firewalls for instructions.
OK. So I have the Network guide a look, and it gave me this oblique answer:
5.2 Dealing with NAT and firewalls
Note: NAT (Network Address Translation) is sometimes called "IP Masquerading" or, more generically, "Internet Connection Sharing". It's a facility that lets multiple computers on a private network ("behind the NAT") share a single public IP address. NAT may run on a standard computer or on a dedicated routing device.
Note also that Mac OS X has a built-in software firewall, which can be configured in the Sharing system preferences.
Currently, if you are behind a NAT or firewall trying to play a game with people on the "outside", there is no need to configure your NAT or firewall if you are joining a game. You will need to forward TCP and UDP port 4226 to gather a game.
This doesn't seem right, since for one it doesn't even deal with the joining problem that the troubleshooting guide acknowledges. Past that, I don't even know what it means to 'forward TCP and UDP port 4226', and giving a look at my network and sharing preferences didn't really give me much more to work with.
Can anyone help me?
