CrayFray
Member
I have posted about this story in the Kart Krew discord before, but I felt also to post it here because I don't want this story to be buried. I have to tell this otherwise I will go insane, and also this is funny as hell to me. This might have been the biggest "locking in" moment I may have ever experienced in my life.
A few weeks ago when Ring Racers came out, I wanted to play Ring Racers with friends but couldn't host a game as my new ISP put me behind an IPv6 address (IPv6 fixes from SRB2 for Ring Racers aren't available yet). Port forwarding was sadly not an option anymore. I have previously hosted local servers on my machine for friends to play on. I said "screw it" and started to research exactly what my problem was, and what I could do to fix this.
A bit of searching revealed that I may have been put behind a carrier grade NAT by my ISP. I don't think this is the case as my router still has a public IPv6 address. However, the core issue was that I couldn't port forward with my router anymore due to only having an IPv6 address. Further research has revealed that I had the option to instead get a Linux VPS with Wireguard installed, and route game server traffic through that instead to my PC. That way, I'd be reachable through an IPv4 address.
You must understand I am a complete noob when it comes to Linux operating systems and VPSes (never used a command line Linux system before), but I had background knowledge of networking thanks to my apprenticeship that I am finishing this month. I decided to lock in and get this VPS tunnel working, no matter what.
There was a chance, and I took it.
Getting a VPS wasn't difficult, but installing and configuring Wireguard was. After a few hours I was able to snag a script installer for Wireguard and by Day 1, I had a tunnel establied between the VPS and my PC. Only thing left was to fix the slow Internet connection and port forwarding it in the conf files.
Day 2, hope turned into axienty as I took a deep dive into iptable configurations to try and figure out exactly what I needed. I had to adjust protocols, rules, configurations and try to somehow jungle my way through this networking stuff. Long story short - I frankensteined portforwarding rules together and slapped them onto the VPS conf file. The tunnel was now there, I also could access the internet normally. I called up one of my friends, booted up SRB2K to test it, and there it was. A successful connection. We raced around, took a victory lap and I was so full of joy. I don't think I was ever this happy about being able to do something like this myself.
I went through all 5 stages of grief within like 72 hours and ended up with my own VPN tunnel that finally allows me to host game servers, not just Ring Racers but really any game from my PC again. I can host a game for Ring Racers again, by some bloody miracle. I never locked in this hard in my life and ended up getting something awesome out of it.
So in part, thank you Kart Krew for turning my brain into a fueled neuron factory and somehow making me fix a problem that I had no idea I was even capable of fixing within just 3 days. I will assume this move by you was completely intentional and will therefore express my dearest thank you.
If anyone is interested (also with the same problem as I had), I would be willing to give a guide on how I achieved this step by step and make it as noob friendly as possible. Looking back now upon this, it really was not that difficult to set up.
A few weeks ago when Ring Racers came out, I wanted to play Ring Racers with friends but couldn't host a game as my new ISP put me behind an IPv6 address (IPv6 fixes from SRB2 for Ring Racers aren't available yet). Port forwarding was sadly not an option anymore. I have previously hosted local servers on my machine for friends to play on. I said "screw it" and started to research exactly what my problem was, and what I could do to fix this.
A bit of searching revealed that I may have been put behind a carrier grade NAT by my ISP. I don't think this is the case as my router still has a public IPv6 address. However, the core issue was that I couldn't port forward with my router anymore due to only having an IPv6 address. Further research has revealed that I had the option to instead get a Linux VPS with Wireguard installed, and route game server traffic through that instead to my PC. That way, I'd be reachable through an IPv4 address.
You must understand I am a complete noob when it comes to Linux operating systems and VPSes (never used a command line Linux system before), but I had background knowledge of networking thanks to my apprenticeship that I am finishing this month. I decided to lock in and get this VPS tunnel working, no matter what.
There was a chance, and I took it.
Getting a VPS wasn't difficult, but installing and configuring Wireguard was. After a few hours I was able to snag a script installer for Wireguard and by Day 1, I had a tunnel establied between the VPS and my PC. Only thing left was to fix the slow Internet connection and port forwarding it in the conf files.
Day 2, hope turned into axienty as I took a deep dive into iptable configurations to try and figure out exactly what I needed. I had to adjust protocols, rules, configurations and try to somehow jungle my way through this networking stuff. Long story short - I frankensteined portforwarding rules together and slapped them onto the VPS conf file. The tunnel was now there, I also could access the internet normally. I called up one of my friends, booted up SRB2K to test it, and there it was. A successful connection. We raced around, took a victory lap and I was so full of joy. I don't think I was ever this happy about being able to do something like this myself.
I went through all 5 stages of grief within like 72 hours and ended up with my own VPN tunnel that finally allows me to host game servers, not just Ring Racers but really any game from my PC again. I can host a game for Ring Racers again, by some bloody miracle. I never locked in this hard in my life and ended up getting something awesome out of it.
So in part, thank you Kart Krew for turning my brain into a fueled neuron factory and somehow making me fix a problem that I had no idea I was even capable of fixing within just 3 days. I will assume this move by you was completely intentional and will therefore express my dearest thank you.
If anyone is interested (also with the same problem as I had), I would be willing to give a guide on how I achieved this step by step and make it as noob friendly as possible. Looking back now upon this, it really was not that difficult to set up.