Server Help

ASSS Questions - ports

reel bad - Mon Feb 24, 2003 11:01 pm
Post subject: ports

I was thinking: wouldn't it be great to have just about the only online game that you can play right through a port-blocking firewall (client-side of course)? These firewalls leave open port 80. So we want to run the game on port 80, but we also don't want to conflict with an http daemon. What if we embedded the ability for subgame.exe to pass http requests to a web server (tcp) and keep the subspace (udp) packets for itself? There would only be one program using port 80, subgame, and the webserver could run on some other random port that subgame connects to. subgame could relay http data as well as server data, couldn't it? the server checks to see whether it's tcp or udp data and separates it accordingly, giving back tcp data to remote browsers, and udp data to remote continuum clients.

then, i suppose, firewalls could block udp 80. can you make tcp act like udp, and flag the ss data from the cont. client to stay at subgame, and let the rest pass to the webserver?

Is there any way any of this could work?

also, what would happen if you just ran a zone on a dedicated ss server (no web) on port 80?

SOS - Mon Feb 24, 2003 11:49 pm
Post subject:

I don't think this is possible or has any point to it.

Quote:

also, what would happen if you just ran a zone on a dedicated ss server (no web) on port 80?

Well you would be running a zone on port 80

reel bad - Mon Feb 24, 2003 11:57 pm
Post subject:

SOS wrote:

I don't think this is possible or has any point to it.

Quote:

also, what would happen if you just ran a zone on a dedicated ss server (no web) on port 80?

Well you would be running a zone on port 80

well, then people at school or an office with a firewall would be able to play. And what happens if someone http's to a subgame on port 80 is what i meant.

Dr Brain - Tue Feb 25, 2003 12:04 am
Post subject:

I live at my school, and I can play. No firewall config to play, but some needed to host.

reel bad - Tue Feb 25, 2003 12:10 am
Post subject:

at my school, we have a student-run network with port blocking, and a district-run network with no blocking. so i can play on one network, but not the other.

Dr Brain - Tue Feb 25, 2003 12:16 am
Post subject:

So the firewall activly blocks the ports? This is to STOP things like SS, the only reason to develop something like this would be if people were not able to play with normal firewall settings (which is not the case).

reel bad - Tue Feb 25, 2003 1:29 pm
Post subject:

yeah it's to stop it, but if it goes through port 80 then they can't stop it w/o a proxy. i go to a high school, but i know that a lot of colleges block ports too. it would be a huge population increase, and the college t3'ers wouldn't lag either.

Mine GO BOOM - Tue Feb 25, 2003 2:24 pm
Post subject:

First try and see if your college/school's firewall blocks UDP ports first. Sometimes they may open the TCP/IP port 80, but not UDP. In that case, you can't do anything to bypass it.

reel bad - Tue Feb 25, 2003 3:26 pm
Post subject: Re: ports

reel bad wrote:

then, i suppose, firewalls could block udp 80. can you make tcp act like udp, and flag the ss data from the cont. client to stay at subgame, and let the rest pass to the webserver?

could you take error checking out of tcp by having a short ttl or something?

k0zy - Tue Feb 25, 2003 3:30 pm
Post subject:

Just tunnel the subgame port through port 80...

http://www.htthost.com/httport_3_download_page.htm

I never tried but it should work...

Bob Dole.. Bob Dole... Bob Dole...... bob dole.... bob... dole....

Anonymous - Tue Feb 25, 2003 3:57 pm
Post subject:

While it would be pretty easy to add support for running Subspace over TCP, it would be a very bad idea. TCP is meant for situations where latency isn't really important, but reliability and throughput is. Those are exactly the opposite requirements from most games, which need low latency but don't send that much data.

There is software that would let you set up a UDP tunnel over TCP (or if there isn't, it wouldn't be that hard to write), but unless you have a really really fast connection, the lag would probably make it unplayable.

What might be a better option is to tunnel UDP over ICMP (pings), because a lot of firewalls aren't set up to restrict ICMP. I don't know of any software to do this, but I wouldn't expect it to be that hard to make.

For the record, the TTL has nothing to do with error checking (in that sense), and you can't take the error checking out of TCP. The best you can do would be to disable Nagle's algorithm, but even that probably wouldn't be enough to get a good connection.

reel bad - Tue Feb 25, 2003 4:59 pm
Post subject:

thanks for the reply grel! it was very helpful. if you have any more to say about icmp tunneling i'd be glad to hear it. about the ttl, i was thinking that once the time since the packet was sent goes over the ttl, whatever machine that had the packet dropped it, so that the pipe wouldn't get clogged with obsolete data, just like udp. i realize latency would be a huge (insurmountable for most users) and that's why i was wondering if you could make tcp behave like udp. it would be great to have a udp-icmp tunneling game that can get through almost any firewall. is the basic idea to keep pinging the host, and instead of the random garbage normally sent as the data, you have the game data? if anyone gives serious thought to this i'd be interested. also, if you want to shoot my idea down, i'd read those posts too

have a nice day all

p.s. - upon logging on today and actually being awake, i decided the webserver portion of the post at the top of this thread was really dumb.

reel bad - Tue Feb 25, 2003 5:00 pm
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Mine GO BOOM wrote:

First try and see if your college/school's firewall blocks UDP ports first. Sometimes they may open the TCP/IP port 80, but not UDP. In that case, you can't do anything to bypass it.

it is udp. they block almost everything (web, ftp, ssh, and the like are open, but almost anything about 1000 is closed on tcp and udp).

Mine GO BOOM - Tue Feb 25, 2003 5:17 pm
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With your > 1000 ports blocked, i recommend:

If you want to run continuum at school, run catid's proxy on another machine outside of your schools firewall, and set the proxy's port to something your school allows.

If you want to run subgame at school, just set the port for the zone below your school's firewall port cutoff limit, and run a proxy somewhere else so you can forward the directory server data over.

Anonymous - Sat Apr 26, 2003 6:29 pm
Post subject: Subspace and Firewalls

I've noticed SubSpace shows a remarkable ability to get around firewalls. I'm running pretty much the default WinXP firewall and SubSpace plays just fine, however I'm having a problem with my own UDP app that I'm trying to run, my firewall seems to block its UDP connections. When I look in my firewall log, subspace UDP connections always show my IP as the source IP, NEVER the server's IP. This seems kind of weird, but I don't know much about this stuff. Also the source port seems to fluctuate every once in a while, and the dest port seems just completely random. Can anyone explain how subspace sets up its UDP connections so maybe I can get my own program to work that way? Help is much appreciated!

Murderous George