rec.autos.simulators

I saved some posts from some of newsgroup readers explaining how to
allow GPL to host online races through an IP masquerading linux box,
but I didn't see anyone mention that they could also *join* a race
as well as hosting a race.

If anyone out there is using this setup could you please summarize how
well you got GPL to work with this setup (both hosting and joining).

I am currently running both a linux box and a win98 box with individual
DHCP dynamic IP's, but may be forced in the near future to only use
one IP so I am considering going the IP masquerade route, but not if it
will no longer allow me to host or join GPL races online through my ADSL
connection.

Thanks in advance for any info.

Seeyas on the track.

--John (Joao) Silva

I've done investigating and have offered my thoughts to Joel
B.  at Papyrus (who was nice enough to be interested in our
problems).  I believe they are figuring out how best to support
this in GPL and maybe release a patch.... Don't know the status
though - the tone of things seemed to indicate "soon", but I haven't
heard anything for a month now.

Hosting, no problem:

Use a port auto-forwarding program on your linux box (like ipautofw)
and auto-forward ports 32766 and 6971 to the private IP address of
your PC behind the linux box.

Example (assuming internal network is 192.168.0.x, and internal PC
is 192.168.0.2):

./ipautofw -A -r udp 6971 6971 -h 192.168.0.2 -v -u
./ipautofw -A -r udp 32766 32766 -h 192.168.0.2 -v -u

As a client... well, as I've said above, no luck yet.  If there was a way
to get IP masquerading to relax its restrictions a bit on matching
return packets from the GPL server, we could get it to work.  Or,
papy could modify GPL to send back certain bits of data on a client's
original connection to port 32766 on a server.

Best of luck, and let me know if you find anything interesting...

...Andrew

Papy is working on it, but I haven't heard from them in a couple of
weeks.  There is no way to join a race through a Linux gateway, but you
*can* host a race, even on VROC.

Baby steps...

I'm getting a little annoyed that it's taking so long to resolve the
issues, but conversly, I'm a programmer myself and understand the
difficulties with patching a glob of code as large as GPL must most
certainly be.

--
=========================================================
John Simmons - Redneck Techno-Biker (Zerex12)
http://www.members.home.net/jms1/index.html

John Simmons - Barbarian Diecast Collector
http://members.home.net/jsimm/diecast_index.html

If you want to send me email, go to either of the URL's
shown above & click "Send Me Mail" in the contents frame.
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I hope Papyrus is indeed working on a patch or workaround for this problem.

Thanks for your help and if you find a way around it please post, I will
do the same if I hear of a way.

Thanks again.

Seeyas on the track.

--John (Joao) Silva

Cheers!
John

Please explain.  Are you using a private IP address behind the router, or
a public one?  What is the exact nature of your particular NAT scheme?

...Andrew

Seeyas on the track.

--John (Joao) Silva

The router is a Bay Networks RT-328 if that helps you understand the
NAT scheme. Basically my home network runs on Win95/Win98 using TCP/IP
and "public" IP addresses (192.168....). The router uses my static IP
address assigned by my ISP to speak to the outside world, and rewrites
the packets as they go in and out, changing my static IP address to my
internal one. That's the theory. For GPL I had to default all
"incoming" packets (not those originated from my system by a mail, WWW
or news call) to the internal IP address of my *** PC which runs
GPL, and that works perfectly. Now that will probably not work on a
large network with firewall since your network administrator will
probably not want to route all incoming packets to your PC.

Cheers!
John

I'll wait for Papy to come with a software fix.  :-)

--
=========================================================
John Simmons - Redneck Techno-Biker (Zerex12)
http://www.members.home.net/jms1/index.html

John Simmons - Barbarian Diecast Collector
http://members.home.net/jsimm/diecast_index.html

If you want to send me email, go to either of the URL's
shown above & click "Send Me Mail" in the contents frame.
=========================================================

My ISDN router was free, but normally retails for around $250 or so if
you shop around. Still, I have the impression that you need something
capable of handling more than ISDN, so it will likely be more
expensive for you. Hoopefully a fix will be fothcoming soon...

Cheers!
John