Help with server errors (pics)

[Derision]

Originally Posted by Eva Aisling

could you explain port forwarding to me?

I'll try

Things you need to understand first (which you probably do):

Each device (e.g. PC) on your LAN at home has an IP address, e.g. PC1 has address 192.168.1.100, PC2 has address 192.168.1.101, etc).

These are your internal IP addresses.

Your router will also have an internal IP address, e.g. it might be 192.168.1.1. This is the address your PCs forward packets to that need to get to the Internet.

Usually, your router will only have one external (Internet facing) IP address, e.g. it might be 88.50.30.20.

Packets leaving your LAN and heading out onto the Internet undergo Network Address Translation (NAT), i.e. when your PC1 sends a packet to, say google, before your router transmits that packet out onto the Internet, it replaces the source address of PC1 (192.168.1.100), with it's own Internet facing address (88.50.30.20 in my example). It also puts a unique source port address, so it knows, when Google replies to the packet, that it is PC1 that the reply has to go to.

OK, now, when you are running an EQEmu server, each component of the server 'listens' for incoming connections on specific ports, e.g. the LoginServer on 5998, world on 9000, zones on 7000+.

Because the connection to these components is initiated from outside your network, when your router receives a packet from the Internet, it will have your routers IP address (80.50.30.20 say) as the destination address, and, say destination port 5998, if someone wants to connect to your login server.

You need to tell the router which PC on your local LAN is to deal with incoming requests on port 5998. This is what people refer to as 'port forwarding' or 'opening ports'. In most cases you will have one PC running the loginserver, world and the zones, so you would tell your router to forward incoming traffic to all these ports to the internal IP address of your server.

Hope that makes sense. For PCs within your home network, accessing your local server, no port forwarding is required, it is only for inbound connections from the Internet to your server.