How to set up: 2 WOW accounts & 2 computers, 1 router with 1 static IP

[justalookin]

I currently have an office which has 1 OS X Mac machine with WOW installed on it. Next to it is a Windows XP machine which will hopefully have WOW installed on it shortly, with a 2nd registered account.

Both connect to a SMC Barracade 7004BR Router on 2mb broadband, static IP address (cable).

How do I set this up so that both machines are able to use the single connection to play concurrently?

WOW guides state that port forwarding can be done to a single machine (and only one machine, obviously!)... which then forwards the data for the 2nd machine from the internet (??)... but is woefully lacking in a practical guide about HOW to achieve this.

I can easily port forward incoming traffic on my router to the main Mac machine, as is happening right now.. but how to get that link to the second machine? :undecided:

If anyone could give some advice, or point to a tutorial, that would be great :)

[Tanitha]

Typically routers will only support incoming port forwarding to one IP. This is all you need, typically as it's primary use is for the Updating/Patching tool so it can connect P2P to all the other people downloading the patches. (Like eMule, basically) Once the main machine is patched you can simply copy the patch data across to the other machine, it's updater will automatically grab the data from the file rather than attempting to download it again.

Outgoing connections from both computers will typically result in NAT (Network Address Translation). Basically what happens is each machine on your home network (cabled in to the router) gets assigned a private IP address. (192.168.0.x typically) via DHCP from the router. As packets traverse through the Barracade the private IP (src) is translated to the public IP (src). The Barracade will create a hash entry / some other mapping of source/destination information and will reverse that process when the remote host responds. (Blizzard's servers) Then it translates the destination (public IP of your Barracade) back into the private IP that the client machine was allocated to.

So you shouldn't need to do anything for the second machine to connect to the internet / WoW at all.

[justalookin]

Tanitha, thank you for such a helpful and fast response! And nice news too. Hopefully this will help others with the same question out there - I was getting slightly concerned that this information isn't readily available via Google (i.e. is it a daft question...)

Cheers :)