(no subject)

[chhotii]

Now it seems that devices in my home— all on the same subnet— cannot talk to each other. The router is 10.0.0.1. The subnet mask is 255.255.255.0. Everyone can talk to the Internet, out there, just fine. But, for example, Vic's PC is 10.0.0.209, and this computer is 10.0.0.229, and neither one can ping the other. OK, so maybe ICMP packets are not being allowed? But, Vic's PC cannot connect http on my computer, port 80. Or anything else I can think of to try to connect amongst our devices.

This would explain why suddenly I can't get the printer to work.

Discovered this because I thought I was all masterful to have set up a Docker container for a Minecraft server— and then Vic's Minecraft program couldn't connect to it. This deflated me, thinking there was something I was missing in the configuration of the Docker container or the Minecraft server therein. But no; if I spin up Apache on port 80 my computer, and Vic's web browser can't connect to it, this has nothing to do with Minecraft. Just, completely, wtf.

Yeah, I've checked that the firewall is off on my computer and set to "medium - typical" on the router.

Is having devices on your home LAN being able to communicate with each other something that people just don't do anymore?

Comments

[ceo]

Weird. Is the connection timing out, or is it getting "connection refused"? Guessing the latter, if you can't ping. I'm guessing this is a wireless network? Maybe there's some setting on your router where it doesn't forward packets between devices?

[chhotii]

Yeah, it's WiFi. The network is indeed acting as though there's a setting on the router that doesn't allow packets between LAN devices. I can't find any such setting, though.

I've hacked together a solution: since I just changed Internet providers, and the old one didn't want their DSL router back, I tried plugging one of its Ethernet LAN ports into the Ethernet LAN port of the new router. The little red LED forever blinks forlornly that it can't find any WAN, but that's OK, it's working as a local router. Now I connect to our old WiFi network. Weirdly, it defers to the new router for DHCP. It took a bit of prodding to get everything right, but now I have the best of both worlds: a router that routes between local devices, and also routes to a router that gives us Internet access. It's a hack, and I don't know why I have to do it this way, but, OK...