Multiple NIC Cards
 

Well, I've run into a little snag, so I thought I'd throw out my question to see if its plausable.

Can I run EQEmu with 2 NIC cards. The idea is I have an internal NIC that talks with my network like the normal machine that it is, and have one that's "external" that I can put up big firewalls on, etc.

Is there a way to tell EQEmu to use one NIC over another? Should it matter?

-Cory

I'm not sure I fully understand what you are trying to do. But if you are using 2 NIC cards. They will both have a different IP. Just make eqemu use the correct cards IP.

I guess I was considering the outgoing connections.
For example.

Say my EQ Server is set up to be eq.server.net.

So I have one NIC card set to 192.168.0.15 (internal)
and one to be 77.77.77.77 (external - eq.server.net)

When people connect in it should be going to 77.77.77.77,
this is true, but when the program sends out packets to
be returned is it going out on 77.77.77.77 or 192.168.0.15?

Maybe it doesn't matter because any outgoing packets
have a traceable route back to the program. My TCP/IP
networking structure & theory is very rusty these days.

This question is coming up becayse my Internal address has
an extensive firewall system to deny hackers entrance.

-Cory

I am not sure I understand this either... If you have a router then both cards will have 192.168 numbers (unless you have one set in the router to be on the DMZ)..... The router will grab the external IP address. If you dont have a router your NIC that accesses the internet will have your ISP's IP address
It will be going 77.77.77.77 .... It sounds to me like you are trying to set up routing on your pc using NIC cards... But what is the purpose of the 192.168 card... Do you have the server set up on another machine in the network? If you dont then there really is no reason for the other NIC as both incoming and outgoing connections will be on the 77.77.77.77 card....

Sorry, I'm kinda sleepy lately and so I'm probably not explaining things clearly.

My home network looks like this:

Internet
|
Linux Box
|
-Internal Network-

So, in order to route from the internet to a computer on the internal network I have to open up ports on the router to the linux box and then forward them on. Needless to say, this is kind of a pain in the butt.

So, in order to speed this along, and allow myself (and my brothers who live together behind a single router) to log into my system, I added a NIC card to one of my Internal Network computers that attaches directly to the internet.

I'm not having much success with it yet, running into various problems, and I was trying to make sure that the setup I'm using isn't causing problem. IE, the Internal Network computer using the Internal Network routing to send out packets of information that need to come in from the Internet (as the Internet isn't protected (yet) and my internal network is doubly protected)

Does this make any more sense?

Assuming that you are going to be using minilogin and have emu completely running only on your internal network, configure it as though the nic headed to the internet isnt there. The os will handle the routing.

If you are wanting players from the internet to play on the server as well, or plan to use the public login server rather than minilogin, I have no idea.

I'm trying to set up the using the Public Login Server.
That way I can play from my house as well as my brothers who are both tied to the same IP address.

If the other computers in your local network are "Sharing" internet access via the linux box (or the external nic) then you will have to set up each machine behind that to use the external nic as the default gateway and then the external nic should route it to the router.... (If I am understanding you correctly)... I am not very familiar with linux, but in windows to do this you would simply enable internet connection sharing on that nic....

So what do you have below the linux box (internet capable machine)? a switch connecting the internal lan pcs?

My understanding of this is that you need to establish an account on the public login server. You would configure your loginserver.ini file to have

[loginserver]
loginserver=eqemulator.net
loginport=5998
worldname=name to show up on loginserver
worldaddress=your internal ip address
account=server login name
password=server login password

[LoginConfig]
ServerMode=public
ServerPort=5998

The machines to play on it would point their eqhost.txt file to
Host=eqemulator.net

nothing would actually reference the ip address of the internet side nic
since all players will be within the local lan

Not sure how you handle locking the server to restrict who can play on your server. Hope that helps.

The machines inside the lan would set their default gateway to the ip address of the lan side of the server not the ip of the nic connecting to the internet. The linux routing software will handle routing their internet traffic (including login requests). The login server should then respond with the worldserver ip address which is the internal lan ip address of emulator.

Looking at the setup you have above... if you have a Linux box that is configured as the gateway, yes - to provide information to an internal network your going to need two cards.

If thats how you want to keep your setup, id say you need to add a router into the setup, unless you want to configure the addresses on the secondary nic yourself, DHCP makes things much easier in that reguard. Like the others said, You need to configure your two cards to access the internet from other computers, meaning you need to bridge the connections(depending on what linux has for options... on windows, i have to bridge my internet connection w/ my local). Now im not very familiar with linux, this is just speaking in generalities.

If i read it right, your setup wants to have the linux box directly connected to the internet.

The second nic would connect to a router, when u bridge the two together, you should be able to automatically seperate local signals from external signals.

I 'think' it would look something like this.

Incommiong EQ connection to <your external IP address> -- this hits a port on linux box and is routed over the bridged connections to your internal router. The router hitting another port, which would then be shot off to the server. This allows no direct access to your server. Like dark said, the server then responds on the same port, since it is already connected to the world server on ur computer.