Alright, first off I'd like to say hello to everyone. I've lurked through this forum for about a week now. After ~13 years of windoze I finally took the plunge and now have a dual boot of winxp/Ubuntu. I also have a second computer that is used only for LAN get togethers(webserver & various dedicated game servers), that I finally ditched the win platform on and decided to go with Ubuntu server install because at this point this is the version I am most comfortable with. I haven't set apache up yet so I dunno how that will pan out yet. Enter the wonderful Source Dedicated Server (Hereafter SRCDS). I've been doing various dedicated servers for about 2 years so I can navigate my way through them fairly well until now. I'll go through this with as much detail as I can possibly muster up, bear with me. I have searched and searched to no avail have I come up with a viable solution to my problem.
This is a DHCP server hooked to a cable line. All needed SRCDS ports are opened and forwarded correctly to the inside server ip. I can verify this by giving a windows box the ip and it will run a server fine(no, both boxes are not on at the same time).
The SRCDS server is fully updated as of about 15 minutes ago. I use a screen script to launch the various mods, I'll use the script to launch a counter-strike server as an example:
Code:
#!/bin/sh
echo "Starting CS:Source Server"
sleep 1
screen -A -m -d -S CS:S-Server ./srcds_run -console -game cstrike +map de_dust +maxplayers 16 -port 27015 -autoupdate -tickrate 100
And it launches fine. With this script when the server launches, I can see the server in the server list on my main computer since I'm on the LAN, but no one from the outside can see the server(I used 2 friends to verify this). I also used a very nice web based custom port probe to check the outside status of my ports and while the rest of the ports register as "Stealth", port 27015 registers as "Closed". I didn't understand that because the server is running on 27015 and since I can connect to it via my lan connection it's obviously not closed. Switching the router to DMZ and sticking in the server ip address does nothing. "Ok,something's wrong with the ip settings or port settings" I think, so I start tinkering with the setup. Nothing seemed to have an effect until I added a "+ip 192.168.0.150" to the string to make it bound to the static ip issued by the DHCP(I've set the DHCP with the server's MAC address, it gets the same ip everytime). After a quick restart, I can no longer see the dedicated server in my window, but my friends can happily play on it now, and the web based port scanner reads port 27015 as being "open" . Wait a minute...just not showing up in the server window..lets try "connect 192.168.0.150" ...times out. Ok..let's try the ssh..The SSH works, ping works. The fact that my friends can now get on my server from the outside means that atleast the router forwarding is doing what it's supposed to do, but I absolutely do not understand how binding the server to an ip that it had already obtained from the DHCP makes me unable to connect to it while making it wide open to the outside, and the opposite happens when I leave "+ip 192.168.0.150" out. I'm assuming this is not a firewall issue because it's this one command that seems to change everything. I'm sure this is a simple fix but I'm afraid my knowledge of Linux is mediocre at best and I have not the slightlest clue of how to fix or troubleshoot this. ANY help at all would be greatly appreciated. All other network-oriented services thus far work fine, it's this roadblock(and at this point, this is a biga** roadblock) that's really making me want to pull my hair out.