tbaMUD Continued development of the CircleMUD core

Hi there,

I recently started up tba on my own computer, connecting to localhost on port 4000. Is it possible for other people to connect to the game while it runs like this, and if so, how?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

PS - I too have that thing where if I log in, I am denied access to the forums!

If you open a route to your pc, then yes, other people will be able to connect - IF you are binding to all interfaces. Check your config.c.

What Welcor said. To see if you are behind a router try to connect to your running MUD at your IP. Use: http://www.whatismyip.com/ if you don't know it. Most people are behind routers today, so if that doesn't work you need to enable port forwarding in your router. Google your router model and "port forwarding" to find instructions on how to do it.

Running a MUD on your home PC is fine, if you ensure your players can get to it by setting port forwarding on your router. There are, however other considerations, especially if your home PC has a Windows OS.

* The most common and easiest way to work with a MUD on a windows machine is to emulate Unix by running Cygwin. This can be tricky to setup, as the default options don't include what you need.
* If your PC is running MS Windows, you cannot compile while the MUD is running. Unix allows an executable to be overwritten while it's running, Windows doesn't, even in Cygwin. This can be overcome with tweaks to the autorun script.
* Copyover also won't work on a Windows-based machine, although I can't quite remember why.
* If you get any updates that require your computer to reboot, your MUD goes down - this doesn't happen on (or at least happens less often) on remote servers.
* If you hard-drive crashes, you lose your MUD, and don't have a remote backup on another server. This means you need to backup your MUD more regularly.

Advantages:
* Server is FREE, no monthly charges
* More control - you need a website with PHP? just install IIS or Apache with PHP
* You can control downtime better. Turn off Windows autoupdates, and just manually update at the same time every week. This will minimise disruption to players.

I'm sure there are other considerations, but that will do for now ;)

Thanks everyone for the advice - I set up port forwarding on my router (a BT HomeHub if that means anything to anyone), and I still can't get external connections, but it's no real biggy at the moment - just means that the other person who wanted a look (and a good tinker...) at TBA is just going to have to download and run it themselves. :D

Thanks all for the advice though!

also make sure you're not blocking the port with the windows firewall...

Does anyone use Windows firewall? Mine hasn't been turned on since the day I installed Windows 7, cuz I installed Kaspersky the same day. I did forget to set a MUD port for the Kaspersky Firewall though, and had a frustrating couple of days where I couldn't figure out why my MUD stopped working... *doh*

I'm using Mcafee and that's a very good point which had completely passed me by...

Copyover requires integer file descriptors and (I think) some rather unix-specific behaviour with them. In the patches I sent to Fizban, it's not compiled in on Windows builds (which eliminates a pile of warnings as well).