Hey Guru, I'm at the end of my rope after days of troubleshooting with Hamachi. Basically, my friend and I are trying to play some games over LAN and having zero luck. We have tried opening all kinds of ports, UPnP on and off, all kinds of firewall rules, and even opening our firewall or using the DMZ once we had thrown all caution to the wind. All we really want is for him to be able to connect to me through a VPN or some kind of software similar to Hamachi. I mean, when he is in my home these games work fine through LAN so we figure it is a router/firewall/software issue or something we are missing. Something like a networking equivalent to Mumble/Murmur would be great, where I host the server and myself and all my friends can just connect to my computer and away we go. The last thing I'm looking at trying is something with OpenVPN, SoftEther or FreeLAN but I figured I would post here first. I can provide more detail if need be. Thanks!
I think creating VPN would be the most clean and sane execution. You have control of what is happening. With hamachi it's rather black box. Your router might already has such functions.
This might be a little late, but you could try giving Game Ranger a shot. It wont work with every game but the support list is pretty good. https://www.gameranger.com/games/
Hah, I wish. We just have the Google Fiber network box, which has about 5 options. We did try using the VPN tools provided in Windows but found out that we were limited to a single connection, which is super dumb and ended up being a dead end since we need at least 2 active connections if not more. Yeah, I saw this during my frantic searches for something we could use. Sadly, the 3 games we want to play aren't on the list. What we have ended up doing so far is starting a Hamachi Pro trial and setting up a differently configured gateway VPN. So far it has worked just fine for what we wanted to do, but I am still looking for a black box software agnostic solution to our niche setup. Thanks for the ideas and input, Gurus!
Technically, dynamic. If we unplug the router for ~24 hours, they will give us a new IP, but other than that we have had the most recent IP for about 9 months. Why do you ask?
Because if you would have some dynamic IP with renewal every 24 hours or so, I would recommend you to use some DynDNS service to get at least a static hostname to connect to and I would have asked you if you ruled out the ISP DHCP lease renewal to be the root of the issue. Say, do you know Teamviewer and its VPN features? It's free for personal use, doesn't nag you too much (1 window at the start and 1 on close I think, no wait time and clean options like CLOSE or the X). Before setting up an own VPN server or use port forwarding I would try this. Easy to learn, mostly self-explaining or guided options and able to tunnel a lot of firewalls or other blocks. www.teamviewer.com is the official homepage.
