As an indie dev, I'm wanting to enable WAN access to my network for my own application. The intention is for people to be able to host games on a device (PC or mobile) and other friends can connect via IP address. I've got a friend run it and I can connect on the network to them, but they can't connect to me. I also want to be able to connect local devices over WAN for testing if that's possible.
I'm not great at network stuff! I've looked through and enabled port forwarding etc. A ping to the WAN fails. What are the other options/settings I need to fiddle with on the Sagemcom Fast 5364 that TalkTalk have provided?
Cheers!
In theory all you need to do is:
Then you should should be able to access your app from the wan using the address ShiftyGeezer.hopto.org:100
Hope this helps
Not quite.
There are two types of IP address involved here.
There are two ways to get around this, and provide a consistent way of accessing your network.
(1) use a DDNS service such as hopto to ensure that DNS servers are updated whenever your public IP address changes so the domain name will always work.
(2) Use a static public facing IP address. These are generally only available to business customers, although some ISPs will let you have one for and extra fee. I don't believe TalkTalk offer static IP addresses to their domestic customers, although Plusnet used to at £5 a month.
Large games companies will have bought their own block of public IP addresses for their servers so they have the option of them being addressed by IP address or domain name. Using domain names has the advantage that you can dynamically redirect it to a different server, eg incase of server failure or maintenance, without the users having to make any changes. But network and server fail-over policies and techniques are a complex topic beyond simple explanation here.