Soren Dreijer's dashboard

Yes, LAN Bridger supports both auto-joining and auto-hosting. Take a look at the command-line arguments here:
http://getsatisfaction.com/echobit/to...

You need to double-click the tray icon, which is located in the bottom right corner of the taskbar. It should be just next to the clock.

I actually wanted this route to change:

255.255.255.255 255.255.255.255 On-link 10.102.59.2 4445

Not the persistent one. As you can see above, that route, which is your LAN Bridger broadcast route, still has a higher metric value (4445) than your Internet connection's broadcast route (276). We want to lower the first one or increase the latter. Either way works.

You can try changing the command I pasted earlier to this:

netsh interface ip set route 255.255.255.255/32 interface="LAN Bridger Connection" metric=200

, where the string set after 'Interface=' is the name of the LAN Bridger connection in the Network Connections window (the ncpa.cpl window you went to earlier).

You can also try passing in the name of your Internet connection (Telkom?) and set the metric to a high value. That might also work.

This is your problem:

255.255.255.255 255.255.255.255 On-link 127.0.0.1 4531
255.255.255.255 255.255.255.255 On-link 192.168.1.103 4501
255.255.255.255 255.255.255.255 On-link 10.231.110.2 4246
255.255.255.255 255.255.255.255 On-link 41.145.177.238 276

Notice how the metric (the last number on each line) on the route for your Internet connection (I've highlighted it in bold) is lower than the LAN Bridger broadcast route (the line above it).

Fortunately for you, you're on Vista and can run the following command in a command prompt (you must run it as an Administrator):

netsh interface ip set route 255.255.255.255/32 interface=24 metric=200
The idea here is to lower the metric value on the LAN Bridger interface to a value that's less than 276 (which is what the broadcast route for your Internet connection currently is). Once you've run this command, you can do another 'route print' to see the effect.

You might have to play with the values a bit to get it right, but what you want to achieve is to make LAN Bridger's broadcast route the one with the lowest metric.

Hopefully this will fix your issue. In the meantime, I'll look into why LAN Bridger doesn't configure the routing table correctly for your particular network configuration.

Hi Dominique,

Thanks for all the information about your network configuration. You've put a lot of effort into documenting what you've tried and what has worked/failed and that's greatly appreciated!

My first guess would be that the problem is due to your PPPoE connection. We haven't tested such a configuration in-house and it might do something to the routing table that LAN Bridger does not take into consideration.

Would you mind showing me a snapshot of your routing table once you've connected to the Internet and LAN Bridger is running?
You can do so by going to Start->Run and typing "cmd" followed by hitting OK. Then type 'route print' and paste the entire output here.

I'm not a guru at networking, but I have this feeling in my gut that the Virtual Network from LanBridger doesn't quite bridge the subnets from our local Lan networks, bacause when my friend's brother hosts a game on their local network in their house, they can see each it in the "local" window of CoD4.

LAN Bridger *is* correctly bridging the network between you and your friend. Many games use broadcast packets to find game servers on the LAN, and that type of packet is handled differently on the various versions of Windows. As you've already noticed, you can still browse to your friend's computer through Windows Explorer and you can join his game by entering his exact IP address. That's because you're communicating via unicast packets, which have a specific destination host. Broadcast packets, on the other hand, are theoretically supposed to go to anybody on your network, but in reality this isn't the case (especially not on Vista).

Hi Dominique,

LAN Bridger was actually designed with broadcast traffic (such as that used by many games) in mind, so if you're having problems with this feature it's really important for us to solve.

You're mentioning that you've seen this behavior in Call of Duty 4 and 5. Have there been other games where the game server didn't show up in the lobby?

If you wouldn't mind, I'd love to hear a bit more about your network configuration. How many network adapters are currently installed? You can check it by clicking Start->Run and typing "ncpa.cpl" followed by hitting OK. How many network connections show up in the list?

In the meantime, we'll try to reproduce the behavior you're seeing.

Thanks for getting back to us. We really appreciate the feedback so we can improve LAN Bridger.

At this time, if you wish to host your own network, LAN Bridger must be directly connectible over the Internet.

If you're behind a router, you must forward a port on the router (port 40001 by default) to your computer's IP address.

Also make sure your firewall settings allow incoming connections on port 40001.

MrWoo,

Let me see if I can get around to all your questions here. Please feel free to ask again if you need further clarification.

How LAN Bridger connects peers:

LAN Bridger is completely decentralized. Unlike Hamachi, you don't need to use our central server to connect to your friends' networks. Instead, the network profile that gets generated when the network is created is the 'key', so to speak, for people connecting to your network. The network profile contains information about the location of the master, i.e. your LAN Bridger server, and other things used to ensure that a secure connection can be established. In other words, you can host your own network without ever interacting with our server. This also means your network will continue to work even if we have an outtage (fingers crossed).
Since networks are always password-protected, only people who have the network profile and who know the password can join your LAN Bridger network. Also, since the network is never registered at our servers, nobody can find your network without having the network profile. This gives you extra security if you want to run in private ("stealth") mode.

How LAN Bridger deals with IP addresses:

The IP range that Hamachi uses is essentially a reserved range that nobody should be using. For LAN traffic, three segments have been allocated that you might have seen before:

• 10.0.0.0/8


• 192.168.0.0/16


• 172.16.0.0/12

These special ranges are also documented here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classful...

Since Hamachi uses a non-standard private IP address range, some applications (including many games) don't work correctly because they expect to be operating on a real LAN segment.
LAN Bridger, on the other hand, allows you to set up the IP range you wish to use for your network. The person who hosts the LAN Bridger network can configure this in the Network Settings dialog. By default, the IP address range used on your LAN Bridger network changes every time you host the network. You can change this behavior in the Network Settings dialog as well.

On a final note, if you want to go the Hamachi route, you can still assign the same kind of 5.x.x.x addresses that it uses, but I strongly advise against it.

Ports in use by LAN Bridger:

By default, LAN Bridger uses port 40001 when you host a network. You can change this either in the Host Network wizard, or at a later time in the Network Settings dialog once you have hosted the network. Just remember to send your friends an updated copy of the network profile if you've made such changes. In the future, we'll make it a lot easier to pass around these profiles, but that's work in progress.

Games

As I've already mentioned before, LAN Bridger has better support for games than Hamachi since it emulates a real LAN network with real private IP addresses. LAN Bridger also handles broadcast traffic much better than Hamachi. This is important when you play e.g. LAN games and you need to search for a local server. This behavior is, frankly, very flaky in Hamachi.

File Sharing

If you want to share files with your friends on your LAN Bridger network, you can use several mechanisms. Personally, I simply use Windows file sharing for small files and FTP for everything else. Rest assured that LAN Bridger will provide built-in support for file sharing at some point.

LAN Bridger is still in its very early stages and there's much room for improvement. We're getting there, though, and I hope you'll stay with us for the ride!