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Playing Games Behind IP Masquerade?
Accipiter asks: "I've configured an internal network to use a Linux box as a gateway using IP Masquerading, and it works beautifully -- except for some off-the-wall things. Recently, I installed Total Annihilation on a Windows box behind the firewall, and I found that it can't connect to other games on the boneyards server (Total Annihilation's Multiplayer setup). How does one configure networked games (specifically TA) on the INSIDE of a network to use servers out on the net?" Most of this is handled in the IP Masquerading HOWTO in particular section 7.22 and the section, appropriately titled, Game Clients. (Read More)
The main problem with Linux IP Masquerading is that, for a few games, you must forward specific ports to a single game machine. This is contrary to programs like Wingate, which implements Internet sharing for Windows for the whole internal network.
Is anyone working for some kind of redirection protocol for Linux that would remove this restriction and allow all masqueraded machines to play games without the need to redirect to a single machine?
You might also want to check out the Masq Apps page, which lists a cornucopia of games and how to get them working with IP Masquerading.
First off, to all you people saying "Read the HOWTO", let's make one thing clear. That was the first thing I did. As a matter of fact, I've read it *several* times over looking for the answer to my question. If it helped, I wouldn't need to ask. (The HOWTO is what got my Masq setup working in the first place. If I didn't read it, I wouldn't be using it.)
Secondly, I have tried the port forewarder as well as the rulesets. None work. From extensive browsing of the boneyards site, I've found that Total Annihilation's Boneyards must allow ports 47624, and 2300-2400 for both TCP and UDP, as well as 9110 and 9113 for TCP. (P.S.: The instructions on the Masq Apps Page pertaining to Total Annihilation do NOT work with Boneyards. I've tried.)
So after firing e-mail back and forth from Cavedog, and extensive trial and error, I have still not been able to do this. So I ask Slashdot. Then I get a bunch of people telling me to "Read the Manual.' Sorry folks, if it was that easy it wouldn't be an issue.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
I'm a huge fan of Total Annihilation actually and would love to play it online more often. But I had the same problem--it didn't work through masquerading.
The entire reason the majority of Win32 based games is they depend on DirectPlay. To put it bluntly, DirectPlay is probably the most badly designed protocol I've ever seen.
It has no concept of firewalls, it opens up random port numbers and does double connections between hosts. Its just evil badness.
I've searched and disassembled and tried to figure out how it works so I could write an ip_masq_directplay module for the kernel, but I couldn't find any decent specifications.
If DirectPlay supported something like SOCKS, this wouldn't be an issue.
I eventually gave up on playing directly, but there are other solutions to play the game online:
1. MPlayer is a free service and they use a front end to the game. You can play matches with TA on MPlayer. They overload the protocol that TA uses and work fine through Masquerading.
2. Kali works prefectly with Masquerading. For TA, Kali emulates itself as a IPX driver that DirectPlay runs over (I believe). Kali works with just about everything. It was also nice to see Kali fire up and immediately tell me I was using NAT and figured out its translated address automatically.
I gave up trying to play TA on Boneyards. I emailed one of the guys at Cavedog (Rick Lambright) and talked specifically about NAT issues. We talked about TA and its dependancy on DirectPlay and that its pretty much screwed in getting it fixed. Kingdoms suffered the same fate.
Cavedog has been disbanded (or extremely downsized) so I'm not sure what the status would be now if anything can be down.
The best solution is to convince someone at the assimilation headquarters at Microsoft to add NAT support (or something like SOCKS) to DirectPlay. If that was added, it could retroactively make ALL DirectPlay games work.
/// Zoid.
The problem is, the HOWTOs and the masq app don't explain how to get all games to work - and for many games, the only way to get them to work is to forward the ports to a single machine, making it impossible for others behind the NAT box to play the game.
For instance, my wife and I could both play quake or quake3 at the same time on the net from behind my NAT box with no problems. But it is impossible for us both to play Diablo at the same time. It has to be one machine or the other, and I would have to change the port forwarding rules to do that.
And as for saying the game coders should get it right, Blizzard programmers have said that they did, and Linux gets it wrong. I just looked for the link and couldn't find it, but they claimed the linux masq worked great for tcp games, but didn't handle udp masquerading properly. They then said that the only proxy that worked was WinGate. I don't know what WinGate does that other programs don't, but it would be nice to know so linux could get it.
G0del
Masq Applications (which doesn't appear to be up at the moment) has an index of all known workarounds and fixes to using software and games behind an ipmasq box. I've had a tough time getting everything working right until I checked it out, so it's definately worth a visit.