Talk:Network Settings

Under the "Straightforward" subsection, is that stuff with iptables/netsh strictly necessary? I was able to rig up my standalone sims to be accessible via an external IP without doing any of that - I just set up a port-forwarding rule in my router, edited the region XML files with the appropriate internal and external IP addresses, and then told my client to connect to the external IP address and it worked like a charm (granted I haven't tried connecting from an actual remote computer but I see no reason in principle why that shouldn't work too). Perhaps for networking neophytes like myself there should be a set of as-simple-as-humanly-possible instructions that'll suffice to get a server accessible to the outside world even if not in the most efficient or elegant way. Bryan Derksen 06:11, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

Certainly the section could stand more clarification (the netsh bit is particularly unhelpful). But router capabilities and settings vary, so yes, alternate methods are probably necessary. I'm pretty sure I tried the settings you describe and they didn't help on my setup. I suspect either your router supports loopback (some do; it's the ones that don't that are problematic), or else those external clients wouldn't actually work if you tried them (which is a symptom of the problem).

As far as I can tell, the point of the iptables/netsh stuff is to convince each local machine to do for the software they run something similar to what the router does for internet clients. That way, the whole OpenSim package can simply be configured to always expect ordinary external traffic and never needs to know that there are LAN clients as well.

I poked around with netsh a bit. From my dim understanding of how the iptables rules work, I'm guessing that you need to do a netsh routing ip nat command (which puts you in the netsh prompt and moves you down into the routing/ip/nat context), and then do something with either the add addressmapping or add portmapping netsh commands. There may also be an install command necessary.

I've not actually got this to work yet, so the above is mostly written in the interests of giving people a (hopefully) better idea of where to begin than "figure out how this works" does. If anyone figures out the details, please post them. -Dyne 04:00, 9 August 2009 (UTC)