Ok, I've got a second machine that I'm setting up to use for a server. Lenore is also going to be using it to play MW. What's the best way to network them and share the net connection? I've heard that routers can be a pain and to go with a hub? WinXP Pro BTW.

Any suggestions?

Generally speaking, I do that on my home set-up here and haven't had any problems. I run 3 (and sometimes 4) machines through a Netgear router, plugged into my cable modem, and I've never had any issues running MW4 simultaneously on multiple machines.

XP has some pretty good networking functions built in, and for me it was just a matter of hooking everything up, running the 'set-up home network' utility on each machine, and we were good to go here.

Let us know if you have any specific problems.

to share a connection, router is way to go. Hub would only work if

a. you had multiple IP's or
b. you used one computer as a router.

I think the problem you may have has to do with how your router can be configured for passing the ports through to the machines you are running MW4 on. Most of the cheap routers utilize simple NAT. This allows multiple machines on your network to connect to the Internet, but all of them appear to have the same public IP address. In order to keep your system protected you must configure port forwarding for the ports MW4 uses to talk to the servers. The problem is that the game server must be able to initiate a connection on certain ports. In most programs this communications is initiated from the client machine. In that case a NAT firewall works just fine. But since the server is trying to connect to your machine the router does not know how to route those packets. This is where forwarding comes into play. You tell the router to forward packets that come in on certain ports to an address inside your network. At this point everything is fine, for one machine. But I suspect you are going to want to have two machines, and your server, running at MW4 at the same time. In this case simple port forwarding won't do the trick.

You need a router that can keep track of the connections and route the packets to the correct machines on your network. One that does PAT (port address translation) should do the trick. Or I believe I saw mention of some packages that act as proxies for certain games and keeps the packets straight. The best solution is a router that does PAT.

Did that cloud the issue sufficiently?

Ah, clear as mud, now. I was hoping to go with Linksys, but I can't find that any of their routers support PAT.

I like the linksys routers, have been running them in many locations for a few years. But I believe you are correct, they do not provide PAT.

Check the Neatgear routers. They may do it and I know a few people that like them and have been using them for some time. But I don't think they have been playing MW4. I looked on the netgear site but only find mention of NAT but no PAT support.

Check these out, they appear to have the feature. Looked like they were in the $100-$200 dollar range.

AOI-908

SOYO

3COM

Check this thread out. Might help.

Cool, thanks

A tool I found useful when sitting behind my NAT router (D-LINK 704) was dxport from www.puffinsoft.com. Run it on each machine behind the router. It allows you to select which range of ports DirectX will use and makes the port forwarding setup on the router easier...choose a different range for each computer.

That was the software I had seen mentioned before. Have not used but sounds like it will work.