"How can I maximize wireless network client performance?"

Though modern wireless networks have certainly improved, they are slow compared to a 100Mb/s or 1GB/s wired network generally speaking. Even if their theoretical speed is not too far below that of 100Mb/s, they often are running at less than full possible speed due to interference and changing reception conditions. So it's good to minimize network access where possible.

One way to do this is to avoid making the client look up the address of important CQC servers, mostly the Master Server. You can hard code this in the client's 'host' file so that the lookup is handled purely on the local machine. This often avoids an extra trip over the network just to make one trip to the Master Server. You should be sure that the Master Server is going to stay at that address, and we recommend very much that server machines have fixed addresses anyway. It just avoids a lot of potential problems. Set up one range for fixed addresses and another for dynamically obtained addresses (in your DHCP server, which is often your router.)

The 'hosts' file is just a text file which is located in the directory:

\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\

The etc and hosts names are historical and come from the Unix based origination of much of the technology used in the Internet.  Also in this directory is a file called lmhosts.sam, which is similar in nature but used by Windows at the NETBIOS level. Probably your system doesn't use lmhosts.sam, and purely works at the TCP/IP level, but it's best to cover both just in case.

The hosts file will have default initial contents, which usually looks something like:

# Copyright (c) 1993-1999 Microsoft Corp.
#
# This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows.
#
# This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each
# entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should
# be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name.
# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one
# space.
#
# Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on individual
# lines or following the machine name denoted by a '#' symbol.
#
# For example:
#
# 102.54.94.97 rhino.acme.com # source server
# 38.25.63.10 x.acme.com # x client host

127.0.0.1 localhost

So it just has a single entry for the magic address that always refers to the local machine. You can just add other entries, such as:

192.168.1.150 Bubba

And this will cause any use of the machine name Bubba to be translated to the IP address indicated. The lmhosts.sam file has the same sort of syntax for each entry. If you are in a domain, then you generally want to use the full domain type address, i.e. bubba.mydomain.com and so forth, but you could put entries in for both the short and long name, both with the same address.

Doing this will generally provide a pretty significant improvement in performance on wireless clients, so it's worth doing. Just make sure that the machines you refer to have static IP addresses so that they will never change, because you are no longer looking them up dynamically.

Close