I've been serving up half-life games on my Red Hat 9 server for years. A friend installed SuSE 10 and tried running the dedicated server for linux but it constantantly produces core dumps when trying to start. I downloaded Ubuntu to see if the half life dedicated server would run there and it does BUT I can't get a port open so gamers can connect to it. Even on my LAN my Windows XP half life game can't connect to the Ubuntu machine. I installed Firestarter and asked it to allow all traffic from my private 192.168.2.14 address but that did not work. I then told Firestarter to all any traffic destined for UDP port 27030, that failed to allow gamers in either.

I've spent two days with Google, Ubuntu's forums, Yahoo and LinuxQuestions but still can't get the machine to allow connections to the game.

I was able to resolve my problem using a Windows SSH client connecting to the Ubuntu device after finding the solution on this forum. I'm hoping someone here knows how I can open port 27030 for gamers to connect.

TIA

Is this HL or HL2 Source?

You need to open a range of ports, the server may not always use the same one. For UDP open port range: 27015-27050

This is Half-Life, the original, not source.
My Linksys firewall is set up okay. I just need to know how to open ports on the Ubuntu machine. I don't care if it's 27030 or 27000 - 28000 I just need to know how to open the port or range of ports.

You said that you couldn't connect from an XP box on the same network, so I was assuming we could leave the router out of the equation.

Been a while, but are you sure it's only UDP? If you allow TCP also, does that fix things?

It is only UDP. I have other game servers running using just UDP but I did try open TCP on the Linksys. You are right, the Linksys is not involved. The machine on the local network can't see the game being served. Port scanning from another Linux machine shows no ports open. I can start Webmin which then shows open on port 10000 when I port scan the Ubuntu machine again. Also if I manually start the ssh server port 22 opens up to allow connections. I just totally lost as to how to configure this box. I've tried the IPTables interface in Webmin but that saves the configuration to a location Ubuntu does not reference when it loads IPTables. I've also tried Firestarter but that was also unsuccessful.