[ulrikrasmussen]

This reminds me so much of my own youth, except for the beach debriefing :). Especially the 4 hours trying to get all computers to "see" each other brings back memories. I remember a particularly puzzling problem where my computer and a friend's computer were unable to communicate directly, but could otherwise talk to everyone else. After half a weekend, we found out that the on-board network devices on our motherboards (which were identical brand and model, ordered from the same place) had been manufactured with identical MAC addresses. After all the black magic that we had applied to the problem, without luck, throughout the LAN, it gave a great sense of joy and relief to fix the problem by simply spoofing the MAC and changing one digit :). We had an epic 8 hour long Age of Empires session afterwards ...

[holografix]

I can't imagine how you guys eventually found that out! We usually resorted to abandoning Windows Network and just hoping we could ping everyone and "see" each other's servers hosted on a computer. Often computer A and B could see C but couldn't see each other. Never ending mess of installing/removing tcp/ip and the other LAN protocols and fudging around with ip addresses etc!! Took forever but when it worked and that first game started rolling everyone was up

[ulrikrasmussen]

I was very fascinated by networks and network protocols back then, so often at LANs I would play around with a tool called "netXray" which could capture network packets (basically a proprietary equivalent of Wireshark).

I could spend a lot of time trying to decipher the data that games would send on the network, and I also tried to mess with my friends by replaying modified UDP packets (rarely had an effect, though). As far as I remember, I found the MAC address issue while playing around with netXray :).