My question, although focused here on quake3, applies to any game that uses the quake engine. I have quake 3 and enemy-territory that I wanted to set up on a private LAN. I posed my question on quake 3 so as to find the most common program that the majority of helpers would be able to assist when answering questions.
The posed question was, why can't I get into the server once the dedicated server appeared to be up and running?
The simple answer is that it was up and running fine, except, there were no maps specified for me to play on, and hence, the server never responded with a map so the clients just sat there awaiting game state.
The command line allows something called +map which is a parameter which is followed by the name of a map.
./q3ded +set dedicated 1 +map <map name>
is a basic command line;
and will start a dedicated quake 3 server and start the named map.
That's what I needed as the solution to my problem.
You can eliminate the need for the +map <map name> parameter if you have a server.cfg file that lists the maps in it.
The whole server configuration is much more difficult to explain and is quite extensive to a new dedicated server admin. It gets easier as you work with it so for those reading this I gave just the basic command line to get quake 3 dedicated server up and running.
Below is a link to a site that gives some good info on setting up an enemy-territory dedicated server. I just used his server.cfg file and changed the "dedicated 2" to "dedicated 1". The number 1 indicates a LAN, whereas the number 2 indicates the internet. Internet dedicated servers are registered with the master servers whereas the Lan (1) are not registered.
http://tjw.org/etded/
Another site for quake 3 dedicated server is:
http://www.3dgw.com/guides/q3a/
