How to connect peers which are on different computers in geth on private network?

Question

I am trying to setup a private network and trying to connect peers. Currently I'm trying it on my laptop and virtual machine(VM) runing on the same laptop (both of them are connected to internet). I init genesis file on my VM, start geth. Then init my genesis file on laptop(same copy of file), start geth.

With help of admin.addPeer("enode://....@[ip]:30303") i add peers on both machines.

admin.peersCount returns 0

Answer 1

You can take a look at: http://chainskills.com/2017/03/17/pair-the-miners-46/, this site is mainly focussing on connecting to a raspberry-pi but an other computer on the same network should also work.

Answer 2

The main way to create a private network is to :

1. Create a bootnode
2. Run geth with --bootnodes "< bootnode enode URL>" On both VM and PM.
3. You can check if your peers are added automatically, or add them manually using admin.addPeer()

If this fails to make nodes connect, it is probably a network problem and you will need to diagnose that yourself (probably your VM and laptop don't share a local network that differentiates between them, internet doesn't since they both have the same gateway external IP).