Network wonkery

NEO|Phyte

I am attempting to run a server for a thing, and something along the network chain isn't behaving. I have hit up the obvious points (verify that ports are correctly forwarded, check firewall settings), and getting no luck on people being able to connect. Unsure what might have changed, because I have been able to host and have people connect in the past.

:edit: well there's a fun wrinkle, poked one of the people that has been able to connect to things in the past, and he is able to connect to a terraria server that I cannot if I plug in the same IP/port that he uses.

BSoB

Needs more info.

Can you ping. From where? Anywhere?

Where are people trying to connect from? behind the NAT or outside of it?

NEO|Phyte

I get ping timeouts when I attempt to ping the IP, but that may be a 'feature' of being on that same IP. Chucking 'ping test' into google gets me sites that apparently get a reply back, dunno what protocol they're using.

Person A is outside of my NAT, and unable to connect to a minecraft server. Person B, also outside of my NAT, is able to connect to a terraria server I put up to test because I know that one has worked in the past. Person B doesn't own minecraft so I can't easily use him as a guinea pig on the minecraft server, and person A seems to have gone AFK so I don't know if he has terraria to try and see if he can connect to that one.

I am unable to connect to either server if I put in my internet IP, but as mentioned above, that may just be because network hardware doesn't play nice with trying to connect to itself. I am not an expert.

BSoB

You should be able to ping it, unless you have told it not to respond to pings.

Is the server on a static IP? If not, when you set your port translation, was the IP a different one than it is now (because while DHCP leases have a preference for staying the same, they will not do so forever.)

Other options include problems with your firewall. A homesized blacklist based firewall sitting on the internet can get overwhelmed after awhile, when its list gets too long, turning the behavior into a deny all, basically blocking all traffic because it identified too many attacks to keep track of.

NEO|Phyte

The server is on a static IP yes, there was a brief period after a motherboard change where it wasn't, but that got fixed once noticed. Firewall stuff gets trickier, I know the router's firewall is on as well as Windows' firewall, but I've hosted minecraft on the box in the past and people were able to join, and terraria is now confirmed working for at least one person, with the other one finally not afk so we'll see if it lets them on as well.
:edit: Update, Person A was able to connect to a hosted Terraria server, so now we're back to the question of why the minecraft one doesn't work. Unless it's started working.
:edit2: and now the minecraft server is working for them, so who knows what wasn't working but it's fixed now, thread can be closed.

LD50

Out of curiosity, are you using custom firmware on your router? Not being able to connect to yourself via your external IP address is a known issue with some versions of DD-WRT.

Feral

Most firewalls will not do hairpin NAT (connecting to a host's translated external IP from the same host). You can't really ever expect that to work.

NEO|Phyte

Very much stock firmware.