Hosting guide?

If one wanted to no longer use cygwin and instead go with linux: would the process be the same for installing a codebase? Is there a guide for pure linux installations of a mud base?

I have heard somewhere that Cygwin won't allow live hosting. If thats true then I would want a pure linux shell to host my code base on.... which leads me to another question

What does it take to go live with a codebase where its not pointed to 127.0.0.1, but my static IP with a specific port. I am not ready yet but I'd like to learn what makes this transition happen. Are there any resources out there?

Cygwin and Linux are very similar for building (the code) so if you got a Linux host you should find it much the same. Maybe the locations might be slightly different, that's all.

Cygwin would allow live hosting, it just might not be a good idea. If you are talking about hosting from your PC at home, then it would have to be on all the time, you would need to "port forward" from your router to your PC's IP address, you would have trouble developing new versions of the game without taking the live server down, and so on.

The address 127.0.0.1 is just "the current PC I am on", so if you connect to that you always connect to yourself. This obviously won't work for anyone else, even in your own house.

If you got a live host, they would tell you the IP address and port, and you would connect to that. When you started the MUD you would use the port they specify, and to connect you use their IP address and that port.

Well, in the world of programming, I am a C# developer with a lot of hardware experience and a moderate amount of professional network experience, but when it comes to servers and hosting, I havent even opened up port 80 on my own machine to do something as easy as web hosting, so I am curious how it all works that I can take a locally hosted MUD and expose it on a specific port. I have done port forwarding for things like RDP on 3389 on my personal router and on larger configurations.

So if I did port forwarding to my machine's subnet (where my MUD is hosted) on say 192.168.1.10, then is my WAN IP the one users outside my network would use to connect in on that forwarded port?

Thanks a lot, Nick. This site has always been a great help to me and I appreciate your videos too.

Yes. Say you have the MUD on (local) IP address 192.168.1.10 port 4000, first I would test using a laptop or something that you can connect to that address from another machine on the LAN. If not, check your firewall settings on the host computer and make sure you let external access to the MUD in.

Once that is working, set up the router to port forward TCP port 4000 to address 192.168.1.10. Then others should be able to connect to your WAN address, port 4000.



You are welcome.