Lan Gaming problem

Ok guys i know not strictly a networking question but it is networking related, i have warcraft installed on my two machines and want to play over my lan, Running 2 desktops and a laptop in a workgroup all running winxp pro sp1 connected through a netgear 10/100 hub, now when i go to play against my brother i noticed that i get lag, this shouldn't happen over a lan so i did a bit of research with task manager and it turns out were playing each other over my internet connection, Adsl 512k pipex which i have shared between the three machines and the lan usage remains at 0% in the networking tab in task manager. i have zonealarm running and so if i block warcrafts internet access but allow it on the trusted it doesn’t work i am unable to see my brother or join any game he has created??

Any ideas appreciated

Can you not like join a direct game by typing in the LAN IP of the other computer hosting the game? (192.168.0.1 for example)?

no mate it dosen't seem to have the option of doing this, you just go to the muliplayer screen and it shows a list of games available, or not as the case may be

And there's no option for "Show LAN Games" and/or "Show Internet Games" or anything like that? :confused:

I'm not familiar with Warcraft as you can see, lol

Warcraft is old and for LAN it uses the old IPX/SPX protocal, so you need to go into networking on all the machines on your LAN, bring up the installed protocals screen, click install, and find IPX/SPX and install that. Then the games should show up.

Thank you:)
will try it and let you know how it goes

Ok guys did some more research, game is actually using tcp/ip , it's warcraft 3 roc, we both have our own versions and cd keys and were both runing on the same workgroup and using zonealarm, now i have his ip address in my trusted zone so surly the udp and tcp ports it uses should be open but for some reason it still seems to require internet access to see each other, but then it uses the internet to play and not the lan because lan usage remains at 0%, any one have any ideas?

Oh, Warcraft 3 uses TCP/IP, but you said Warcraft, so consequently I gave you a fix for that :rolleyes: .

Firewalls normally create problems. Turning it off probably wouldn't help as somehow they still seem to interfere until you uninstall them, but you probably don't want to do that.

But what IP address are you entering to connect to? As if you are entering the LAN address (192.168.X.X or 10.X.X.X or 168.192.X.X) then it shouldn't go external, as you are telling it not to....

yes the ip address is 192.168.0.xxx, both machines are in this range, entered the ip address manually and the subnet is 255.255.255.0. the network and subaddress are added as a network in to the trusted zone in zonealarm, and for the truted zone i have switched of the firewall.

Can't understand it???