Troubleshooting

Sometimes you can’t get the system to work at the first time. A successful setup depends on three independent steps: network configuration, ComSocks setup and application proxy settings.

  1. If you can PING your computer from each other, you are assured that your wiring and your local network adapter is working. Usually, you will refer to the network adapter’s manual for the help information. If you are using a coaxial cable to connect your local computers, you need two 75 ohm cable terminators to terminate the both end of your network. If you are not using NAT, ComSocks will not route PING messages to the Internet, and you will get a time out message if you PING an Internet host name. Here is an example:

Pinging www.yahoo.com [204.71.200.75] with 32 bytes of data:

Request timed out.

Request timed out.

Request timed out.

Request timed out.

Please note that the host name www.yahoo.com has be resolved to a IP address 204.71.200.75 by ComSocks.

  1. You shouldn’t connect any Internet adapter to your local network. For examples, you shouldn’t connect your cable modem or your xDSL device to your central hub or into the coaxial cable chain because they belong to a different network (Internet). Please connect them directly to your gateway’s network card.

  2. Your gateway computer running ComSocks normally has at least two IP address, because it needs one IP for each network to identify itself. For examples, it may have an IP 24.12.34.56 from your ISP for the Internet, and it has another IP address 192.168.0.1 for your LAN. Please refer to Local Network Setup for how to assign an IP address to your computer.

  3. You shouldn’t configure the DNS Tab and the Gateway Tab for the local network adapter in your gateway computer. You ONLY need to do so in your client computer and you are not going to use a DHCP server. Those IPs should be your gateway’s IP (i.g. 192.168.0.1). If you want to know the settings after you have changed them or after client obtains a dynamic IP from the DHCP server, you can run a DOS command “winipcfg” (clicking More Info button) or “ipconfig -all” in your Windows to verify your settings. For examples, your server computer (running ComSocks) might look like this:

    help_image/winipcf2.gif

Your client computer might look like this:

help_image/winipcf3.gif

  1. You will need to create or edit the HOSTS file in your Windows directory if you are not using a DHCP server. Please refer to Host Names

  2. Verify that ComSocks is using a correct proxy IP address. Don’t use the Internet IP as your proxy IP. By default, ComSocks will pick an IP for you. Please refer to the General Tab for details.

  3. If you experience a port conflicting with other applications (binding error), you might not get the daemon to start. You will need to re-assign a new proxy port to the corresponding daemon. This might happen if you are running Comsocks HTTP daemon and a web server on the gateway together. Please check your Activity Window to verify all the daemons:

    help_image/comsocks00000015.gif

  4. You can enable Logging in ComSocks in order to trace some setup problems.

  5. If you still have some questions, please feel free to send us an email or fill out our on-line question form. Please send us a result of command “winipcfg” or “ipconfig”. Do not forget to click the More Info button and select the local network card in the drop down list in the “winipcfg” window.