Topic: Connection timed out

[Codeman]

Trying to race over ip with my brother but cant get his game to connect, it just says "Connection Timed Out" every time he tries to connect. Ive made 1000% sure the ip and core.ini are correct, and have changed his firewall and router settings a million times and still no luck, somethings still blocking his game.

Does anyone know what else could be causing this?

.....its not on my end. Its solely his computer, his game is somehow blocked from the internet even with the firewall turned off(in windows and in router settings).

I know how to setup DMZ so people can connect to me, Ive done it this way for years. Other people are able to connect.

[Brian Peters]

If you know how to make your computer connect directly to the internet service and take the router out of the equation you can eliminate the router as the problem.

DMZ'ing your PC is not a good solution to allow a PC host a game, it's best to use port forwarding so that only the port ranges to specify are responding to incoming connections.

Your PC that is DMZ'd is going to be wide open to all port scans leaving your Windows OS exposed, and that is NEVER a good thing.

Other issues that are possible is that your ISP is not allowing their customers to run servers by blocking all incoming requests, only allowing traffic that is the result of a connection initiated from the customer.

I don't know your level of networking knowledge so I might suggest some things that seem simple but I work in the ISP business and see a lot of strange things from our customers.

You are giving your friend your public IP address and not your PC's private IP address on your network right?  I am assuming since you know how to DMZ a PC that you have done some kind of hosting and know the difference but just want to be thorough.

What port do you have your race server listening on?
Is your friend entering your public IP address followed by a colon and the port that your server is listening on? 
Example:  ###.###.###.###:32767

If your hosting PC is DMZ'd and firewall turned off, your PC should respond to a ping, can your friend successfully ping your IP address?

[Brian Peters]

If you do port forwarding on the hosting end you need to forward a range of ports to the hosting PC.

NR2003 listens on one port for people connecting but then for every client connected to the server it uses another port starting with the listening port +1, and so on.

If your server is listening on 32767 and you want to have 10 people connected you will want to forward 32767 to 32777.

The protocol is UDP not TCP, that's important in your firewall or what protocol to forward in your router.

[Robert Vining]

I was kinda hopin' you'd chime in here Brian. Thanks.