I am trying to play online games, but I cannot see any online games in RH 9.0, RTCW or Enemy-Territory. I am running iptables, but I still should be able to see games as I am not hosting them, right? What ports would I have to open if any to see games online?


I don't know if this is relevant but, I can see online games in Unreal Tournament 2003, but I cannot join them. Are these related?


Thanks,
Walter

hmmm,

well for starters you are probably better off having a firewall rule that allows any connections that originated from your network to be allowed back in, otherwise you will have to open up wide range of ports. This can be done with a state based rule that allows ESTABLISHED connections in (netfilter.org seems to be down at the moment but if you check there under the tutorial section there is a good link explaining state based rules).

you only need to open up specific ports if you want to run a server yourself.

can you do everything else, web, mail, ftp, etc.?

can you connect directly to a known server ip? (you will have to find one, try doing a search for a wolf server that is close to you).

if you do find a server you could try to telnet into the server ports (from memory they are around 27950, but you probably should check for sure before trying this).

well all i can suggest is running lokkit and setup a new firewall ruleset...i once had the same issue, and when i re-did my ruleset everything worked fine again...i couldn't figure out why this happened to me, as i had a pretty basic iptabes and it was actually pretty close to being a default file....i hardly made any changes to it, and at that point it still did work after changes anyways..., but one day i couldn't view online or join games....all i can suggest if you do in fact do this, is to backup your existing file in case you had any relevant changes that you want to refer back to for ya can re-add them entries...

Yeah, I can surf the Internet, ssh, ftp just fine. My /etc/hosts.allow only permits people to connect to ssh and ftp, but this should not affect me connecting to others. I cannot even get a list of servers and I am positive I am connected to the Internet. Yeah, I also tried this with iptables turned off and I could not see any servers, I assume people still play the game, right?

When my iptables was stopped I could easily join a UT2003 demo game, but RTCW games are not listing still.


So, at least I can play UT online and know that it is an iptables issue.

Walter

Sutekh,

I would I change my iptables ruleset to allow incoming connections for games like you said? Can I run gnome-lokkit, or is there another I should use? You said to backup my existing file for iptables, but where is this configuration file?


Thanks,
Walter

/etc/sysconfig/iptables is the file...
and yes you can run gnome-lokkit as its just a frontend for lokkit.

I see the file, but I don't understand how I would change it to permit games to work correctly (allowing established connections someone said earlier). Can someone show me their iptables or clarify how to set them up correctly?


Thanks greatly,
Walter

the ESTABLISHED rule I was refering to looks like this

iptables -A FORWARD -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT

*** NOTE ***
you will want to modify this to suit, probably have a few rules attached to this i recommend http://www.sns.ias.edu/~jns/security...conntrack.html for details.

This is a general rule that applies to all traffic however, so if web, etc is working then that is most likely not going to help. In fact if you disabled you firewall (and still had internet access) it almost certainly wont help.

It may not hurt to use tcpdump to check what is actually happening when it is trying to connect. To do this get tcpdump if you don;t already have it and probably ethereal (makes it a lot easier to follow what happened, in fact you could just get ethereal and capture directly if you are on the machine that has the internet connection).

If you do this you canstart ethereal, try to connect with wolfenstein and then quit and check the packets it sent.

There is on other thing and this is a bit of a long shot.
If you are playing the original RtCW (not RtCW:ET) then there were several upgrades and mostly there were not backwards compatible. If you are not running the latest version it is possible that no servers remain for you to connect to.

The other thing is to check your filters, are you filtering out any servers?

worth a look

if you have the bandwidth download RtCW:ET and see if that works (it is about 280Mb download)

let us know