Praise and question

[oghog]

First off,

I have been an EQ veteran and played for nearly 5 years. Im now in a location where I can only have satellite internet through Wildblue. While it works ok for surfing, I can only imagine playing a MMO would be the suck if not impossible.

With that, this is about the only alternative I have for myself and family to play some type of large RPG together.

Thanks so much for all the hard work you guys do, it is really appreciated! I have been telling my friends about it and they are all extremely interested so I hope I can help open up some new faces in the community.



I have only a couple of minor problems with my minilogon server that maybe you guys can help with.

First off, sometimes when my wife and I are playing, we zone into the same zone (IE East Commons from Nek forest), while grouped or not. Most of the time we are end up in the same zone together, some times we cannot see each other but are fully zoned over and can see same mobs etc...
Almost looks like were in a seperate instance. One of us can zone over and back (some times have to do it more than once) and we are in the same zone at that point. Its just a minor annoyance but anyone have any ideas?

Also, after I bring up the Minilogin server and run EQEmu, it seems that the first client to log in (either hers or mine) will lock up after selecting character and clicking on enter world. I never see that the client has been kicked on the server side tho. Also/or sometimes when bringing up the client and clicking on play EQ (from the log in window) it gives the small window saying its connecting to the server, but never gives a server selection screen.
In both these cases you can ALT CTRL DEL out and restart the client and it reconnects (usually without further issue)


Any help is much appreciated!

[vales]

That's one of the problems with Minilogin. It verifies each client by IP addresses. So if you and your wife are on the same LAN, then you're going to have connection issues.

Try putting in your LAN IP (192.168.0.2, 192.168.0.3, etc.) in the accounts table in MySQL. This way, it separates the accounts by LAN IP rather than WAN IP. If you're using a router that's fairly old, you're going to have issues because it probably doesn't have NAT Forwarding. But first, try the link in my next paragraph, and we'll cross over that line when we get to it.

There's tons of questions like you mentioned on the forums, and you might be able to find more information on it. In the short time I've been here, it's been asked quite a lot and pretty much resolved in most cases. This post might help you. Angelox's configuration and explanation on the Minilogin is explained better there.

[jimbabwe]

as far as the different instance thing I have it happen a bit as I run 2 accounts on two different computers, and this generally only happens if I try to zone them into a zone simultaneously. If the zone is running and has a player fully loaded into it I have never seen this problem. (But then again, I'm also on a mixed wired/wireless network)

[oghog]

That's one of the problems with Minilogin. It verifies each client by IP addresses. So if you and your wife are on the same LAN, then you're going to have connection issues.

Try putting in your LAN IP (192.168.0.2, 192.168.0.3, etc.) in the accounts table in MySQL. This way, it separates the accounts by LAN IP rather than WAN IP. If you're using a router that's fairly old, you're going to have issues because it probably doesn't have NAT Forwarding. But first, try the link in my next paragraph, and we'll cross over that line when we get to it.

I have put our lan ip's in the accounts table. Verified those with MySQLCC.. My PC is the server PC as well. 192.168.1.150, and hers is .151...

Its just minor connection things, as we can get on and play from seperate machines in the Lan, but I was thinking it may have something to do with ports or what not. I do have an older Linksys router, not sure model # since im at work right now....thanks for your replies tho.

[vales]

Ah.

If you're running the server on your PC and playing on it as well, then make your IP field in MySQL accounts to 127.0.0.1 and leave her's at 192.168.1.151. That might help a bit.

Set up the Minilogin server as if you were the only one connecting to it (make everything 127.0.0.1). The router should take care of the rest since your wife is playing on a separate PC on your LAN. Just put 127.0.0.1 in your eqhost.txt file (since you're connecting to the PC you have the server on), and make sure your wife's eqhost.txt says 192.168.1.150 since she's connecting to your PC. The router should forward all connections to your PC automatically.

If all else fails, you can use Hamachi. All that software does is create a VPN with unique ip addresses. There was talk about it a while ago on the forums. I've tried it myself once, and it worked fine. But try using it as a last result. I personally found it a thousand times easier to run a Public server and just lock it out to everyone except my friends and I. It's not eating bandwidth, either, since it's only connecting to the server to show my name on the list. All of the bandwidth is just the same as Minilogin. But better in terms of security.

If you need help with that, don't hesitate to ask.

[oghog]

I tried changing over to public login, I can see my server there, but everytime i connect to it, it times out.

Im assuming this is because Im on Wildblue sattelite internet and my ping times are god awful.

I tried connecting to PEQ and other servers with the same effect. It just simply times out before i get to character selection screen.

Any suggestions or am i just screwed playing on other servers?

Thanks in advance for any help.

[John Adams]

Way back in the dawn of cable internet, there was a file in EQ client called "datarate.txt". Not sure if it's still used, but you could set that to 9, from the default of 5. That used to help me years back with extremely crappy connectivity via Speedchoice (microwave) internet.

[oghog]

Dont see any datarate.txt file in the client anymore. I remember using it back in the day as well, but dont see one on the titanium client.