Port Forwarding NightMare

[wulfen]

Hey guys,

At the moment my current setup is a linux box connected to the internet via cable, with simple ip masq enabled, with 2 windows ME machines behind it connecting to the internet via the linux box (if that makes sense). So far I have encountered no problems, games, apps, everything has worked perfectly. But I recently bought Mechwarrior4 and tried to play it online, and lo and behold, it doesn't work (it's also a microsoft product, consiracy theory anyone?).

Anyway after much searching through help from various sources, I think I've come to the conclusion that the problem lise with me not being directly connected to the internet. Which means I have to enable port forwarding to work.

Can anyone tell me a couple of simple commands(if there are any) to make my box forward ports (my linux box has external ip on eth1 and ip 203.45.187.209 and internal ip on eth0 and ip 192.168.0.2) to my windows machine with the ip 192.168.0.210

Oh and I'll expand on "multiplayer not working"
I can connect to the zone (microsofts gaming thingy) and download the list of games, and I can view details and everything works fine, just when I try to click on the button that says "join game" it pauses then says "Cannot connect to server, either the network is down or the host no longer exists"

Any help would be much appreciated.

[njcajun]

Yeah, I tried to run Age Of Empires, with a similar setup, too. I haven't gotten around to actually fixing it, but I pretty much understand what needs to happen.

When packets go out to the net through the Linux box, they assume the Linux box's IP address, and then go out to wherever. Replies then, of course, go to the Linux box. The Linux box is then either going to dump it to /dev/null, 'cos it has no use for these silly packets, or it's going to reject them based on the port they're coming in on. What you need to do is put some lines at the bottom of your ipchains script defining the ports used (available at the M$ gaming site), and then you have to set the policy to 'FORWARD'. Since you're on a normal IP-hub network, you don't have to put your internal IP address to forward to, because on that system, all boxes get all packets, and the one that can use it takes it.

YMMV, RTFM and all that stuff (my standard disclaimers, in case I'm wrong http://www.linuxnewbie.org/ubb/smile.gif )

------------------
Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will use it.

[Delta_z]

You might check out this site it will tell you which ports you need to forward. http://www.tsmservices.com/masq/