Discussing a 2-person LAN setup
Discussing a 2-person LAN setup
I'm trying to get some old strategy games running so you can play with your brother. He has a strong fear of the internet, so we want to avoid any online connections. With just two of us, can we connect our computers directly with an Ethernet cable? Or would we need a switch? Even a simple router we have at home could work for this setup. Thanks for your question—I'm not very familiar with networking, but I appreciate your help!
Avoid using a switch. Just link both computers together with a network cable and give each a private IP address. These addresses begin with 192, 172 or 10. For instance: PC1: 10.0.0.1 PC2: 10.0.0.2 Both have a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0. To verify the link test the connection by opening the CLI and entering "ping 10.0.0.2" from PC1 or "ping 10.0.0.1" from PC2.
Modern Windows often sets up its own private network automatically, which can simplify things since you won’t need to manually check IP addresses.
You can also assign a fixed IP address on his device using your standard network connection, without defining a default gateway. LAN functionality will operate, but it won’t be able to access the Internet.