That is exactly how I am running mine. With both internal and external users. It does work. There are a bunch of posts in these forums with individual pieces that will help you out. I can't begin to try to explain why it worked then didn't work for you, but I can point out some key items that need to be set correctly or watched for. At times I had to recheck my configuration a few times before I had success, so maybe another viewpoint will help. All of this information was gleened from these boards and trial & error.
Minilogin --
Since you've correctly configured your miniaccounts.ini as you said, the key point for this is to send your external friend to a site like
http://www.whatismyip.org and add their real IP to your miniaccounts.ini pointing to his account, which I presume you already added to the db. Once he tried to log in you will see an entry in the minilogin window along the lines of:
Matched xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx to 'user' <= xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is their IP, user is their ID you configured the IP to point to in the miniaccounts. Minilogin needs port 5999 forwarded to it if you have a router such as the dlink or linksys.
World --
World server needs port 9000 forwarded to it. Some key points about the first few lines of the loginserver.ini
[LoginServer]
loginserver=192.168.0.50
loginport=5999
worldname=Give Me A Name
worldaddress=myhost.no-ip.org
2nd line - loginserver - is the internal IP of the loginserver. Other posts said to use localhost or 127.0.0.1 but during my trial&error I changed every occasion to the real internal IP. I don't use the loopback or localhost anywhere.
3rd line is the port your minilogin is listening on, which you forwarded already.
4th line is worldname that cannot contain the word server and has to be within a certain number of characters that I can't recall at the moment.
5th line - worldaddress - is the EXTERNAL hostname I went and got for free at no-ip.org or dyndns, wherever. That external hostname points to your external internet IP of course. This plays a role in both the internal and external clients, see below.
Zones --
By default you start up 5 zones on ports 7995-7999. You'll need to forward those ports to your zone server, which if you run everything on one box will be straightforward because it is the same internal IP. In the batch file itself - Boot5zones.bat -
start zone . myhost.no-ip.org 7995 192.168.0.50
After the dot, you have to put the external hostname again, because when you have an external client, the world server will send them to a zone by having them connect to myhost.no-ip.org:7995. So if you put your internal IP in there, it works for you but not for them.
After the port number, you put your internal IP in there for your world server because that is the IP it uses to connect the zone to your world server, which is usually on the same box. Every line that starts zone should look the same except for the increasing port number. Note again, I didn't use localhost or the loopback, opting for the real internal IP.
EQHost.txt --
For your external client, it's easy:[/b]
[Registration Servers]
{
"myhost.no-ip.org:5999"
}
[Login Servers]
{
"myhost.no-ip.org:5999"
}
For my internal client I wanted some consistency. So I use the same exact eqhost.txt as above, but since I can't reach that address from the inside in most cases, I have to trick it. So on win2k/XP I edit the notepad c:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file and put an entry in for:
192.168.0.50 myhost.no-ip.org <= makes that host resolve to my servers internal IP, instead of having the internet DNS resolve it to the external IP.
On windows 95/98 I don't recall the path to the hosts file, but that is also listed somewhere on this forum.
Hope that helped you find your problem.
Little of this post is my own work. It was almost entirely gathered from these forums. For example, thanks Mattmeck on the forwarding. I guess if I was smart I would write up a step-by-step guide on running it behind a firewall for us poor 128k bandwidth users that can't put a real server up =b No promises though.