Just discovered something awesome

[Davros]

No doubt this is old news to everyone, but i'm new to networking so i think it rocks
I was adding a laptop to my network now i know that i can view files on a networked pc
I wondered can I run a program installed on 1 pc on another so i copied notepad.exe into a shared folder and it ran yay...
Since I need to install some games onto this laptop (ive heard laptops have other uses, I refuse to believe this)
I thought can I run a game installed on 1 pc on another so i shared one of my games folders set up the correct permissions and it works...

ps:
I have 2 win7 machines networked but zonealarm blocks the homegroup (not networking) I have to turn off zonealarm for homegroup to work, anyone know how to fix this ?

 

[pcchen]

You can mount a network folder with a drive letter (I mount my NAS's data folder as Z. Most applications will be able to use it as a normal local disk. If you have a reasonably fast network, such as GbE, it should perform almost as well as a normal local disk too.

 

[Blazkowicz]

I did that some time ago, we had my own PC, with 2GB + 3GB hard disks, and the family PC with a huge 45GB disk (I was one of the kids). We got a network, with hub prices crashing down (10BaseT) - before we got internet access in fact ; dialup was too expensive.
A number of games would work that way, in particular Age of Empires II which wasn't even peeved that two computers would access the files at the same time, read/write. Some games might be less pleased. Thinking of it, more recent games on modern systems ought to be not bothered by such issues as if they work like well-behaved application, they should write data in "c:\documents and settings" or c:\users and not in the game's directory.

Nowadays you could even share actual, "real" drives with e.g. iSCSI and your computer will think it's a real one, not a shared directory. (note that compared to a network file system like Windows shares, you can't do concurrent writes or access from multiple computers, or if you do it will trash data in catastrophic ways)
It should be a somewhat complex chore, involving a FreeBSD or Linux installation and manual configuration, but by chance I found this by looking for "DVD drive on iscsi".
http://support.alcohol-soft.com/knowledgebase.php?postid=20309&title=Share+drives+over+network
If it works I think it would allow CD checks with the real legit game CD/DVD in a drive, other the network, and that would be really cool (unless e.g. Securom is programmed to find out about it and piss you off)

 

[orangpelupa]

if the main pc is only streaming data to you is fine, but beware if sharing to too much concurrent people accessing data from the same harddisk.

the transfer speed can crawl

 

[Blazkowicz]

It's not necessarily bad, on a four player game you end up joking about who hasn't finished loading yet

 

[orangpelupa]

lol i remember that when we played NFS Shift over network lol. That game is the worst for sharing HDD over network, all player use data in the same time.

on the other hand, we can play L4D fine as long as we "connect" in turn.

 

[Davros]

Back to the original post can a networked pc be on the net (not lan)
if so would it be possible to play the games installed on a friends pc ?

 

[Grall]

You probably would need to set up a VPN tunnel* between your machines, since - presumably - you're both behind NAT firewalls. You REALLY don't want to expose your PCs' IPs directly to the internet, that would be inviting all sorts of trouble you really don't want to have to deal with.

*Don't ask me how to do that, I'm terrible at networking stuff... A howto should be googleable tho.

 

[Malo]

You want to load a game from a friends computer over the internet? Even if you go through all the hoops to get that functioning, the load times would be horrendous and unless the game happens to be one that loads everything into RAM for the session/level, it's going to be a serious problem playing it.

As an aside, ZoneAlarm still exists? I hadn't used that for a long long time.

 

[orangpelupa]

@davros

i think you better to use Steam in-home streaming (combined with Hamachi) for that, or Chrome Remote Desktop.

 

[Chris123234]

@davros

i think you better to use Steam in-home streaming (combined with Hamachi) for that, or Chrome Remote Desktop.

I don't agree. Unless I had some technical issues I was too lazy to fix, the video quality wasn't good enough and the input lag noticable when I last tried Steam streaming. That was with LAN. With internet virtual LAN that would be horrendous gaming.