Talk:Starting a PW

Opening the ports
First, I want to thank you for the great job.

I'm not sure about all those firewall ports for starting a server (it's too many ports for my security-liking and too many confusing messages out there).

This is what I have seen by personal trial and error. My server is hidden behind a SmoothWall firewall, XP firewall and also behind something called PeerGuardian.

The NWN2 server itself opens one port and listens to it. In my case it's 5121. You can see that by checking out what PID your server has (just do the Ctr-ALT-DEL and check the processes list). Then start the command prompt and write "netstat -noa" (without the quotation marks) to check out the ports. All ports are shown there with the corresponding PID.

Next, I've looked closely on what ports the dedicated server is using with the WireShark (with everything else that would communicate with Internet as turned down). When the server is started, it sends 2 udp messages: 1) destination 204.50.199.12, source port 5121, destination port 6121. 2) destination 207.38.11.34, source port 5121, destination port 27900.

Then it continues to send these messages once in a while.

One can also see that after these were sent the first time, the servers on the other side answer (and they ONLY use the 5121 as the destination port).

So what I needed to do, to get the server work and be seen on gamespy was to open the 5121, 6121 and 27900 ports in the WinXP firewall (check first if NWN2 is installed there). Then I forwarded these ports from the smoothwall firewall. And to make it work, I needed to give the two specific ip-addresses to the PeerGuardian, to let the two answering messages in (without this, the server didn't show on Gamespy).

You might also want to open the 13139 (Custom UDP Pings) port, because without it the GameSpy doesn't show your ping. I personly haven't opened it. People can't see the ping, but the server is there, and they can connect to it just fine.

I hope this will help someone out there. Memengwa 13:04, 15 March 2008 (UTC)