[Davood]

i never charged for it but i am full up on all my ips

if there is a way to do some passthrough to another ip internally with the same external ip (would be possible if we could change the eq ports gah), then i could offer many many servers worth of hosting np.. i have a limited number of ips, but i have alot of servers with room for a couple of vms here and there

if you really like, and have some knowledge of networking, we can necro one of my old threads where trevius and some others tried to find a way to make it happen.. and we just collectively gave up.. that was a few years ago (possibly 3 years ago) so there are new people here now. with new ideas.

Basically the problem is the port that is used to connect to the world.. its hardcoded in the client.

how do you differentiate two different servers with teh same port and the same ip?

very hard to do unless you have a special router ($$$$$) with load balancing options (ive been trying for years to win a skid of them at government auctions, i came close once... hehehe)

then you could have a website that you have your players go to and say "i want to connect to this ser ver when i login from login server" it then captures your ip address and when the router sees your ip it will pass you through to that specific internal ip of the server you chose on the website (little bit of php and other stuff to do for the admin np). that way only one of the servers from that "server family" would work for you, but the server hoster could have many servers hosted with teh same ip in that way.

its not pretty.
another way would be to somehow agree on some interface parameters to meet the above requirements, and add it as a feature in the login server itself, so that when the user connects to these "special servers" the login server authenticates with the hoster webserver whicih then does some secure connection to the router and updates that ip to access the server that was just clicked on.

i understand that might work however
i don't know how to do that.
it would require the eqemu people to accept it as a paradigm
and well, i can't think of another good way to do it.

i seriously do want a router that can do that, i would setup something along those lines if ihad the hardware - just to learn how to do it.

I did call my ISP last week, they refused to give me more ips, even if i wanted to pay for them.