Port forwarding to more than one computer on a network?

[gobrun]

Me and my housemate are both on a Netgear DG834 router. It was only today that I actually discovered that ports can only be forwarded to one machine on a network at a time rolleyes. This is a problem...

We both play company of heroes a lot and as any veterans of the game will know Relics peer to peer game matching service is a complete joke. Right, the game requires ports 6112 & 30260 to be forwarded, this isn't a problem, I'm perfectly adept at creating firewall rules to open ports. The problem is it only opens the ports on either my computer or his computer, it can't do both simultaneously. This means one of us is left with a torrid time trying to connect to the same 2v2 CoH game while the other gets straight in because only one computer has those ports open.

I'm thinking there has to be someway to get round this? Can't you assign one IP address to every machine on the network or something? I assume this is how a standard ADSL modem thats providing internet access for two computers works? Would I need a network card with dual sockets in order to do this using a router or is it only possible with a modem?

Thanks!

 

[gobrun]

Why do you need to forward them, just open them.

Assign 1 ip to every machine on the network.. O_o

And a standard ADSL modem will not share a net connection, one of the machines on the net work will has ICS running and NAT takes care of everything...

You would probably find the solution is pretty simple if you didn't think you know everything.

I can't open both ports to both IP addresses at the same time. The router will only unblock ports for one IP address. (whoever altered their static IP address last in the IPv4 config).

Let me explain what happens...

I set my computers static IP to 192.168.0.30
My mate sets his static IP to 192.168.0.31

I go into network config and make four new firewall rules. I make 2 rules opening ports 30260 & 6112 for my ip address and I make 2 rules opening the same ports for his IP address.

Unfortunately the router only opens these ports for one IP address at a time, for some reason it can't do both simultaneously no matter how many rules for how many static IP addresses I input....

The best 'solution' I've found so far is to only open 6112 for me and only open 30260 for him. Problem is I don't know whether CoH requires both ports to be open or one or the other. Thing is we've tried playing a few games and connectivity is still nigh on impossible for both of us at once.

Thanks for the answers so far folks.