Games on network cannot detect games hosted on same network

exodist · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 27 Jul 2004 Posts: 100

I work at a charter school, we allow students to play games here, but the district forbids us from doing it on the same IP scheme that is normally used.

To solve this problem we make it so that only games on linux can be played, at the moment we have quake 3, unreal tournament, tremulous and a couple others.

When someone loads a game a perl script brings down eth0 and brings it back up with a new ip address different from the district scheme.

Doing it this way means games cannot detect running servers. you can still play if you manually connect to the ip address, and this has been okay until now because the game mode we have uses static ip's.

However now we are trying to make starcraft work via wine. We can make it run just fine in every way except like others it cannot detect hosted games, this is a problem here because you cannot manually connect to an ip, or if you can we cannot figure it out.

I have tried having the script remove the /etc/resolv.conf file

I have tried installing bind and having named run on system startup

No idea where to go now.

Ip scheme:
192.168.93.x

Ken69267 · Posted: Mon Jun 04, 2007 11:18 pm Post subject:

I suggest asking the wine people or looking at http://appdb.winehq.org

I know that my CNC3 networking problem will probably never be fixed

_________________
!snack

exodist · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 27 Jul 2004 Posts: 100

it is not a wine problem, it is a network issue. Because UT, quake3, and tremulous are all native versions, and they also can not see game servers.

Hu · Administrator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 23192

Could you post the output of ip addr show; ip route show both on the normal network and on the gaming configuration? /sbin/ip is part of the sys-apps/iproute2 package.

exodist · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 27 Jul 2004 Posts: 100

Regular:

Hu · Administrator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 23192

That looks OK. When in game mode, does broadcasting work?

What is the rationale behind playing with interface addresses instead of just configuring the gateway to disallow passing traffic to other subnets during the time a system is in game mode?

exodist · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 27 Jul 2004 Posts: 100

I have no control over the gateway, and the switch at our school has a direct lien to the district switch, if a loopback occurs (net cable plugged back into the same switch) it brings all the schools in the district down, so we need to use a seperate subnet so the switch does not send those packets on automatically.

exodist · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 27 Jul 2004 Posts: 100

another note, I tried making ipx work for starcraft, as soon as ipx was configured properly I got shouts from around the building that the computers were locked, when I shut off the system I was testing they came back up, started it up again they went down, effected the whole district because of switch directly connected, so it is critical, and ipx is a no go. (we are on a novell network)

I am not the district tech guy, and I do not touch the district servers, yet I am responsible for all the stations at the school. as well I teach technology (including linux and perl classes I created)

Hu · Administrator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 23192

That is an amazingly fragile network. It should not be possible to bring everyone down with one incorrectly placed network cable.

As I said in my prior post, does broadcasting work in game mode? What about in normal mode? Starcraft uses UDP broadcasts to find its peers. If the switch is not passing broadcasts, that will break Starcraft. I suspect most other games are similar in their use of broadcast for peer discovery. Even if broadcasting does not work, all is not lost. If that turns out to be the case, I can elaborate on how to work around it.

Monkeh · Veteran Joined: 06 Aug 2005 Posts: 1656 Location: England

Use a VPN?