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.

Comments

Microsoft DirectPlay and Masquerading

[Zoid]

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.

Re:Microsoft DirectPlay and Masquerading

[Pulzar]

I've found the following setup for DirectPlay, Game Zone, Mplayer, and Boneyards somewhere on the web, and it has worked well for me.. You can join and play any DirectPlay games, but you can't serve them. (At least, I couldn't get it to work).

I remember reading a note that came with this, saying that you need DirectPlay 6+ for this to work, since the previous versions use random port numbers.

This is a part of the Sygate apprule file, but you should be able to convert it to whatever you need..

# DirectPlay, Game Zone, Mplayer, Boneyards - Modification tested on 8/16/99
# Most of DirectPlay games use this rule
:INIT "DirectPlay"
OUT TCP 47624 47624 0.0.0.0 0 R
:SUB
IN TCP 47624 47624 0.0.0.0 0 0 AD
IN UDP 2300 2400 0.0.0.0 0 0 AD
IN TCP 2300 2400 0.0.0.0 0 0 AD
OUT UDP 2300 2400 0.0.0.0 0 D
OUT TCP 2300 2400 0.0.0.0 0 D
IN TCP 9110 9110 0.0.0.0 0 0 AD
OUT TCP 9110 9110 0.0.0.0 0 D
IN TCP 9113 9113 0.0.0.0 0 0 AD
OUT TCP 9113 9113 0.0.0.0 0 D
IN TCP 28800 29000 0.0.0.0 0 0 AD
OUT TCP 28800 29000 0.0.0.0 0 D
IN UDP 8000 9000 0.0.0.0 0 0 AD
IN TCP 8000 9000 0.0.0.0 0 0 AD
OUT UDP 8000 9000 0.0.0.0 0 D
OUT TCP 8000 9000 0.0.0.0 0 D
:END