Hosting on a Router

[Billabong81 0]

Sorry guys, I am sure this has been asked before. I did a search and looked through the 1st five pages and decided I would just make a new topic . I have a linksys BEFSR41 router and want to host little games when me and my friends want to play. Can anyone give me instructions on how to do this?

I tried opening ports 2300-2304 but it didn't work . Any tips?

[adumb 0]

open port 2302

[Billabong81 0]

It should be open because 2300, 2301, 2302, 2303, and 2304 are all open. I hate my router .

[adumb 0]

do you have a firewall up ?

[Billabong81 0]

I disabled the windows firewall. I could have another one running that someone else installed on my PC without telling me.

[benu 1]

Did you open tcp or udp ports? OFP needs udp, port 2302 for the server and port 2303 for gamespy/ingame browser.

[Billabong81 0]

Yep, I opened UDP .

[killswitch 19]

The "big" picture: it is not sufficient to "open the ports". You have to make the traffic coming in to the router on those ports reach your own machine hosting OFP.

So, hooah, what you need to do is to read up on "Port Range Forwarding" in the Linksys BEFSR4 User Guide (page 65-66) and set the router to forward UDP packets on ports 2302-2303 to your computer.

You also have to configure the router to give your computer the same internal IP# every time (this is if you're using the DHCP service on the router, which you probably are). How to do that I'm sure is explained elsewhere in said user guide.

PS. While you're at it - might as well grab the latest firmware for your router, currently at version 1.46.2. How to check what version you have? Again, its in the user guide...

Keywords: router ports firewall port forwarding NAT DHCP server host hosting

[Billabong81 0]

Alright Killswitch, I'll take a crack at it one night when I get my homework done at a reasonable time . Thanks for info .

[Billabong81 0]

Dang, when I want to assign a IP to my PC, I have to contact my ISP for a bunch of info . Not worth all the trouble IMO . Thanks to everyone who tried to help me out , I really appreciate it!

[benu 1]

This should really have nothing to do with your ISP. You just have to create a port forwarding rule in your router. For this your INTERNAL ip has to be known to the router, ie you have to check whether your router uses dhcp to assign ips to computers or not and configure it so that your computer always gets the same ip. This can be done with a "static" assignment or the correct settings to dhcp.

[RN Malboeuf 12]

this is a p[rogram on the net called

tcpview

dload it and run it then load the ofp server and whats what ports are in use

our game servers are behind FW as well and there are a few ports used

we set 2100-2400 UDP

if this does not work for you your ISP may have you behind a Proxy Server - I have been seeing this more often now

[Billabong81 0]

Well, I found out what ports OFP used. I opened them all up, but it didn't work at all . I think I need to do that internal IP thingy, but it seems like it is more trouble than it's worth .

[benu 1]

Opening ports doesn't help. For outgoing connections its something like this: your client wants to go to the bis forum and opens a tcp connection from eg port 12345 to port 80 of the webserver for this forum. The router changes your internal ip (most likely a 10.x.x.x or 192.168.x.x address) for his external ip and sends out your packets. When the reply comes in he looks up the port 12345 in his table and knows that he has to send this to your computer.

If you open a server on your computer and open the ports on the router the situation is different. Connections will be started from the internet. The router will receive connections to port 2302 but there was no connection from the internal net first, so he does not know where to send those packets to.

The solution is called port forwarding (sometimes DMZ or DNAT). You tell your router "to always forward connections to port 2302 to THIS computer". Your router may or may not give your computer a changing internal ip everytime. In order for the port forwarding to work you may have to set up your router to not give your computer a random ip every time. Your router may use dhcp, maybe he doesn't. But it should all be in the manual and not too much work: 1) configure your router to always give you the same internal ip, 2) find out that ip and 3) forward the ofp server port(s) to that ip.