Fanatical_Meat
Survivor
Is it possible?
PC 7D2D via lan
- Thread starter Fanatical_Meat
- Start date
JoeDaFrogman
Refugee
you might need to use Direct IP connect though DEPENDING on how good/bad your router is.
Pernicious
Refugee
If you need a router within a home LAN, you need a better network design, not a better router!
@Fanatical_Meat A simple question usually solicits a simple response, and you've got those. Yes you can.
However, you're going to run into problems with things like Steam authentication, the anti-cheat system, and finding the "server". All of those can be overcome, but most require a reasonably lengthy explanation. So perhaps give it a go, and if you have any problems, come back here and explain which step you stumbled on if any?
Boidster
Refugee
Why would that be? I was presuming a typical internet-connected home LAN. Are you envisioning something self-contained, not connected to the internet?
POCKET951
Refugee
Pernicious
Refugee
I actually was considering traditional LAN parties - i.e. no internet. I'm old... My first LAN party was done over IPX/SPX... on 10Base2... Guess I didn't think through all the different ways that question could have been interpreted.
If the LAN party does have internet, it solves all the Steam Auth and EAC stuff. But the traffic would still loop through the local router, as the host advertises the public IP. E.g. My server is 192.168.3.3, but it registers itself as 20?.12?.?.?
2022-02-23T09:41:10 78.166 INF [Steamworks.NET] GameServer.LogOn successful, SteamID=90156471837211657, public IP=20*.12*.2*.2*
So, traffic from players would hit the router, and in my case, since it's a true router, will just go straight back in, after being NATed. I've seen a lot of "routers" that are pretty dumb, and are more like modems or bridges, and will just pass the packet on to the other interface, which means it actually goes out to the internet and comes back. In that scenario, @JoeDaFrogman was right - you might want to use direct IP to connect, and there's that work to find out what the host's internal IP is.
JoeDaFrogman
Refugee
To be honest, I am a bit confused about your reply. Perhaps there is a terminology difference between myself who is power user(built PC's, develop backend application systems for a living(ie, programmer) vs a network engineer. In my world what is typically called a router is a device that "routes" network traffic from an external WAN to in internal LAN. Sometimes with built in wi-fi, sometimes with ethernet ports, and many times both. This device typically is the "gateway" and in many(but not all) cases also has some rudimentary firewall capabilities such as blocking incoming traffic except over specific ports. Is that a different definition of router to you because that's generally what the US industry calls these devices, though there are some other possible words for such a device.
as to the second part of your comment, I would say that the majority of people just want to plug in from the wall, and plug in their computer and it just work which is what the device I am speaking of does, though personally, I have a gateway device and a separate device that acts as my "firewall", wifi provider, and DHCP provider.
And ot be clear, my comment is based on some fairly old experience with these devices I call a "router" back from the late 2000's working on a networked virtual tabletop applicaiton as a "code monkey" where one of the occasional(though semi rare) problems was when the "router" would not allow DNS resolution which happened on an external host(similar to how there has to be a centralized server hosting lookups for "Game name" to IP/port in 7d2d in order to get a list of joinable servers) to NOT allow such traffic to go out of the firewall and back into the same internal LAN. Again, this was not a super common happening, but it did happen with some shall we say less reputable devices(typically those provided by the ISP that you could not replace in most cases).
That, in my reasoning was the reason why I mentioned direct connect via internal IP address/port as the "router" does not like loopback traffic.
Also, as I said, I am NOT an network engineer, so industry terms for some of these devices might be mis-labeled vs their typical consumer/prosumer names of said same device.
Pernicious
Refugee
No, you're right, there is a difference in terminology. In my world, a router is a device that makes a decision on a layer 3 value of a packet. I.e. it decides which interface to send it down depending on the IP address alone. Technically, what most people have in their homes is not a router, because it doesn't make any routing decisions, it just takes a packet on one side, rewrites it, and drops it down on the other.
A device that changes medium at layer 1 e.g. WAN Fibre, to LAN Ethernet, or LAN ethernet to WLAN should be called a bridge.
A device that decides which port to drop a packet on depending on the layer 2 information should be switch.
A device that decides which port to drop a packet on depending on the layer 3 information should be called a router. Even then, you can have a layer 3 switch, which most network engineers would not call a router. (E.g. crossing VLANs)
My joke which I guess nobody but a network engineer would understand is that if for a home network, you need to make a layer 3 decision to reach another device on the same network, you've got an inefficient or overly complex network. To keep a network performing efficiently, you want to route packets as little as possible, and make the switching decision at wire speed without a routing decision (which is much slower.) I realised after I posted it, it probably came across as harsh for anyone who didn't get it. Apologies if you did take offence.
JoeDaFrogman
Refugee
no worries I was just confused as I did not know it was a joke. I know OF the terms switch, bridge, and router and i know there are some differences, but not enough detail to know exctly what they are. My brother, well he could be called a network engineer(maybe???) as he works on F5 network appliances and various other filtering rules and networky stuff I just don't care to learn would might have gotten that joke.