Allowing others to play my mud

I previously had my mud (a TBAMud/Circle derivative) up and running but recently was forced to get my OS reinstalled because of other issues. Now Ive attempted to get it back up and am running into this problem.

- The mud will compile and I can play it on localhost, but noone else can connect to it. Ive even attempted to connect on my terminal using the IP and port Im attempting to have others connect to, and that wont connect either.

- The error message I get when attempting is code = 10060 (connection timed out).

- I have configured my router for port forwarding. Previously I had it set up for 192.168.1.9 on port 4000 and it was working. I have tried several different configurations of 192.168.1.x and I get the same error message.

- I temporarily disabled my windows firewall to see if it was interfering but that did not fix it.

- I have read through http://www.gammon.com.au/forum/?id=8369 but I cannot identify what I might be missing. It did not seem like nearly this much trouble last time. Any help would be greatly appreciated. If I need to supply any further information please ask.

Make sure you're not telling others your internal IP. That won't work.

Nope Im not using the internal IP. My router wont let me port forward that IP so I was choosing another.

It's no good changing 192.168.1.9 to different numbers, that's just your internal number.

You need to port forward port 4000 at the router to your PC (ie. 192.168.1.9).

Then you tell your friends your external address (ie. the router's address).

If you aren't sure what it is something like this will tell you:

http://www.whatismyip.com/

So your friends connect to the external address (the router address) port 4000. The router forwards port 4000 to your PC (eg. 192.168.1.9), and then they should be able to play.

Okay. I attempted to port forward 192.168.1.9 port 4000, then have someone attempt to connect to my external IP at port 4000, but I got the following error in the client:

Error occurred during phase: Connecting to world: <external address>, port 4000.

It would make sense to me that if Im port forwarding the port to my computer, I should use 192.168.1.1, which is my internal number, but when I try that I get

"Server IP address cannot be router's LAN IP address"

on my router setup page.


Now something that might be a fly in the ointment is that the only terminal I can test on right now is one that is connected wireless through my same router. But for whatever reason I was able to connect before on that terminal just the same as other friends miles away.

No, you need to forward to the internal address of the PC. Doing ifconfig or similar on the PC with the MUD on it will tell you its internal address.

The router can't forward to itself.

Got it. I had originally used ipconfig to find my internal address, but I was reading the wrong line. I was attempting to use "Default Gateway", when I needed to use "IPv4 Address".

Changed the router port forward to the IPv4 Address and was able to connect using the external IP. Thanks again Nick. You're the man.