Hosting On A LAN

[Straw Dog UKD 0]

Okay where to start - we have had a 2mbit/s line installed at work and I have been given permission to use it for hosting games in the evenings, we have an external IP range and an internal reference IP range, I am trying to host on a machine with an internal reference IP (i.e. not within our external range, although I have changed this to an external IP aswell). This machine is sat behind a router and a firewall, I have setup the router to allow the ports to be opened but I can not find the server when I get home (which is the only time I can try to view it) - I only partially know what I am doing and could do with a bit of advice.

The server is running as a service under W2K

Any help or advice would be dearly welcome as all that bandwidth is going to waste in the evenings at the moment. If anyone needs anymore information just tell me what you need to know and I'll find out for you.

I nearly forgot - I would just like to thank everyone at BIS for all the obvious hard work they have put into making this great game and Suma for keeping us updated despite a heavy workload. A bit of advice tho' get a different publisher next time as Codemasters have done nothing for the OFP community except try to squeeze more money out of us.

(Edited by Straw Dog UKD at 11:46 am on Oct. 30, 2001)

[hanzerik 0]

Can you be a little more specific on the type of router and firewall? Is it a combined firewall/router? or 2 separate pieces of hardware? And your saying you have a range of external IP addys, I'm taking that as routeable IP's not private. And you are also using internal IP's I take that as Private range using NAT? Have you tried to ping it from home? If your company has a RAS bank, try to dial-up and see if you can connect, that can tell you if your server is actually working. If you can connect to the server from a RAS connection in your company then look at the network diagram to see how yor network is set-up and where the RAS bank is in relation to the firewall and routers. It more then likely that your firewall is stoping traffic.

[Thundercok 0]

Though you cannot see it in ASE or Gamespy, can you connect to it by using remote and entering the IP?

I can run a DED server on my ISDN, which has a main IP, and assigns IP's locally to each PC, but it will not show up in ASE or Gamespy.

Also, for it to work at all, I have to make sure the server running the DED server is the 1st PC seen/connecting to the ISDN Lan modem/router.

I don't know if this will help, but I am hoping for an answer on getting my DED server to show up on ASE or Gamespy.

[Straw Dog UKD 0]

I am afraid I know nothing about the router but I do know that the firewall is separate - basically it is a frankenstein firewall cobbled together from an old pc. I have tried assigning the machine that is hosting various IP's, both within our external range and outside of it.

I cannot ping any of the IP's from outside of work. My problem is basically getting the IP (which I can set to anything I want) of the machine that is hosting seen from outside.

As for connecting to the server directly from within OFP - its the only way I ever do it, although I have done a scan with ASE and various other IP scanners but with no success.

[Straw Dog UKD 0]

BUMP

[Straw Dog UKD 0]

Bumpity Bump - plz guys - ne1 got any ideas?

[Morchaoron 0]

No idea, I have a problem myself.

I have WinXP and 2 NIC's (one for internet and one for LAN)

If I turn off Internet sharing I can create a game but

no-one on my LAN is able to join.

[Cdave 0]

Well,

do the stuff one at a time.

First assign to your server a private IP address, in the range used by your company on your private LAN

Then give it your router's private address as a default gateway ( necessary if you want your server to respond)

Then comes the tricky part:

you have to get a public address for your server that is going to be used for Network address translation. This is this address that's going to be seen from the internet.

As soon as you grabbed this address (generally supplied bu your local ISP), configure NAT on your router or Firewall, depending on where it's actually done for the other servers of your company so that public address is mapped to private address of the server. (remenber that the server only deals with the private one and is unaware of the public one)

So now you have made a translation from the public domain to your company's private domain.

You just have to set the correct policy rules on the router and the firewall to let OFP games in.

For this, configure both the routers and the firewall to let port 22XXX (i don't know the exact number but it's written in OFP when you start a multiplayer game) in and out. Also let icmp in and out if you want to ping it but be careful to security holes in this case.

hope this helps

Dave

[Straw Dog UKD 0]

Thx alot Cdave that is exactly what i was looking for:D