basic question about setting up server

[jimbox114]

Originally Posted by sianyde

Read the Server Guide. It will show you how to run a server behind a NAT router. I do it. I run the server on my laptop, and multibox with my desktop, and people outside my local network can access it.

Basically, do this: Go to no-ip.com or someplace that will let you register a free domain name. In your loginserver.ini, set your server address to this domain name (not an IP number).

In your OS hosts file of each computer on your local network that you want to use for EQ, set the domain name to resolve to the internal IP address of the server.

In your boot5zones, use this format for each instance of zone:
<internal IP of zone server> <port> <localhost>

BTW, you can have as many instances of zone.exe as your machine can support. You can start 20 zones at once if you want.

But what I'd like to know is how make the zones stay up all the time (i.e. not "sleep"). I already know how to make them persistent.

I have looked around the site and not found anything useful on actually getting this to work with a router. I went to noip.com and registered, but have no idea what I am supposed to do with it. Its wanting to know what host I want for one thing, I guess it would be something to do with a re-direct? And what IP address would I give it, my computers IP address with the router, or the main IP address?

What guides I do find on here seem to be out of date, or have broken links, etc. They also seem to be really vague in many area's, guess they are aimed at the college graduates or something. The guide that comes with the server files don't say nothing about routers either. All this talk about what ports need to be opened pretty much has me lost as well.

A Walk-thru showing how to do this with the ip redirect would be helpful for sure.