LAN Game Problems

Hi all.

I have had eset software for a long time now and recently decided to upgrade to smart security 4 from ss3. While I LOVE eset, I am not sure I love this new version. Version 3 worked fine for me. I didn't have to touch a single thing and it kept me clean of viruses and my games working. Version 4 is working, but I have had to do a lot of work to get it to this point. Wondering if there is perhaps something I am doing wrong and I'm just making it hard on my self.

Let me start off by saying I have looked on these forums under a myriad of topics for help on this issue I'm currently having. None of them have helped me unfortunately. Here is the issue I'm having.

I recently got borderlands for pc and I am trying to play over the LAN with my buddy. We did this with vista and ss3 just fine. I just upgraded to win 7 and ss4, and it didn't work at all. After some testing, I found turning off the personal firewall would make the game work fine and we could play with one another. -- That doesn't sit well with me! I don't want to turn it off for this...so I dug a bit deeper.

I found out I could turn on interactive mode and set up a permanent rule for that program. I did this and that's fine and dandy. My system is still protected and my game works. That said, I'm a little sad I have to do this at all. With the number of games I play, this is going to be a MAJOR pain in the butt to have to come back each time and assign new rules under interactive mode. Again, I went off looking for more info.

I then found out maybe I had an issue with my subnet or possibly addresses listed in my "trusted zones" section of my settings. My router is 192.168.1.1 and subnet 255.255.255.0. When I go into nod, it says 192.168.1.0 instead. Not sure if this is an issue or not, but I can't seem to change the 0 to a 1 no matter what I do, even if I try to add a new one it just adds it as 0. I have the settings on the only subnet I can find set to "allow sharing", and I have even tried to change the IP4 to include an address range of all addresses in my LAN. This didn't work. I also made sure all the boxes were checked in the IDS allowed services setup as well.

I also recently tried to put my printer software on my system and it said it couldn't find the printer, but my router webpage tells me in the DHCP client list that it's there. -- Not sure if these two are related or not, but figure more info is better.

So. long story short, I have a work around for now, and I can get my games to work on lan. I am basically hoping someone here will be able to tell me, "Hey dummy! You just need to do x, y, and z, and you never have to touch it again just like version 3 was for you!"

If not, at least I tried.

Thanks all for any responses.

Edit: I also tried the pre-release client update as well.

 

Hello mazer327,

Have you tried to have your ESET firewall remember the action taken for each specific game you are trying to play over your LAN? When your firewall is in interactive and you attempt to connect to one of your games online play, ensure that you are selecting the box that says "Remember action, create rule". After you have done this on the different games that you are attempting to play online, you can set your firewall back to "Automatic mode with exceptions". This should place your firewall in a protective state but also allow those exceptions to pas freely.

 

Hi, thanks for the reply.

Yeah, that's actually what I'm doing right now. I have made the exception for the game and that works, was just wondering if it was possible to make my entire home network basically a "safe zone" so we can communicate with each other without having to set up these rules each time we play a new game.

I realize this is taking the place of windows firewall, so I'm not sure if what I am asking for is even possible, but seems like it should be able to set the computers on my network to safe for everything so I didn't have to set up exceptions each time we play something new.

Thanks again!

 

Hello again mazer327,

Have you tried Aryeh Goretsky's solution posted on October 23rd? The link to the thread that may have useful information for you is listed below:

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=256472

Regards,

Mat Gauthier

 

Yeah, tried that too.

 

Hello,

Have you tried enabling the "Maintain inactive TCP connections" value in the IDS and Advanced Options section and disabling the "Block unsafe address after attack detection" value in the ESET Personal Firewall settings?

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

 

I had not tried this. Just got done trying it however, and it still doesn't work unless I specifically add in the exceptions through interactive mode.

Thanks for the continued suggestions!

 

Also try enabling pre-release updates in the update setup so that the latest firewall module is downloaded (still available as beta, but no problems have been found and we're just waiting for our important distributors to give us an approval for release).