Author Topic: RogerWilco and IP Addresses Tip  (Read 866 times)

Offline DrSoya

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RogerWilco and IP Addresses Tip
« on: June 29, 2000, 06:46:00 PM »
I was going to answer a post in Bug Reports when I realized the answer belonged here. I thought this could be useful to others. Sorry if this is a little technical, but it's not that difficult to understand.

I'm assuming here that you don't want to use in-game rw tuning with radio 5, but a specific squad channel for example, not hosted on a player's computer. In that case, tune .radio 5 1 and alt-tab to the desktop to manually tune RW to the desired channel.

RogerWilco remembers the last few channels you joined. But if you use many different channels, the IP for a specific channel may not stay long in RogerWilco's memory.

If you frequently use a specific RW channel that is always hosted on the same IP address, you might as well make up a name for it, some kind of shortcut, and configure Windows or MacOS so that you don't have to type the IP address everytime.

E.g. are you tired of looking for 192.168.0.37 when you want to join your squadron's channel (or whatever the IP is)?

For example, during squad nights, if your squaddie Marconi is always hosting RW on his highspeed Internet-equipped computer, and the IP address is 192.168.0.37 and never changes, then why not make an entry "marconi" in your OS' network configuration that equals it to "192.168.0.37"?

In other words, instead of finding the IP address (192.168.0.37) then writing it in RogerWilco, you would only have to write "marconi" as address for your squad RW channel.

In Windows, making "Internet shortcuts" is that's what the HOSTS file is for, in the WINDOWS folder. There should be a HOSTS.SAM in the WINDOWS folder, that is a sample. Just copy it to C:\WINDOWS\HOSTS (or rename it) and add an entry in it for the IP address you don't want to have to type.

The HOSTS file is there so you can have your own private DNS (domain name service), sort of. It only works on your machine, of course. After all, a DNS is some kind of directory book, because each computer on the Internet has an IP number, and that's what really matters. When you type "www.hitechcreations.com" in your browser, your machine communicates with the DNS server to get the IP address for that address. An IP address is returned, 216.91.192.19, and that's the real address that is used to locate the HTC web site.

That HOSTS file exists on all platforms. This works for Macs as well. (Look into your System folder.)

So, to add a "marconi" shortcut to IP address "192.168.0.37", you just have to add this at the end of the HOSTS file:

192.168.0.37    marconi

Then you restart your computer. Afterwards, your computer will equate "marconi" with "192.168.0.37" and when in RogerWilco you'll only have to type "marconi" as "IP Address or Hostname of Channel host" instead of typing "192.168.0.37" everytime.

My squad uses the Resounding RogerWilco BaseStation, so I added this entry to my HOSTS file:

205.240.163.10    rw

This is the address of the Resounding RWBS server, and this line in HOSTS assigns the shortcut "rw" to it. So I only have to type "rw" instead of the IP address or the full domain name.

Next tip: RogerWilco Base Stations and multiple channels.

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DrSoya
308 (Polish) Squadron "City of Cracow" RAF [AH]
315 (Polish) Squadron "City of Deblin" RAF [WB]
Part of the Northolt Wing (First Polish Fighter Wing)

[This message has been edited by DrSoya (edited 06-29-2000).]