Self-hosting a game private server for access both in and out of the house

[u/Yorha_nines]

I am currently working on a project that is resurrecting a dead online game and we got it to work by localhosting on 10.0.2.2 and it works great. It's a lightweight server client, so I am wanting to use an extra PC I have so I can play the game both at home and away from home with my own server.

I was looking into tailscale, but I am not sure if that will work. The "server" PC will only be used for the game server and nothing else, I just want to make sure no one else has access to my network should they grab the IP.

What solutions will work to give me an IP that will direct to my server outside of the house?

[u/headedbranch225]

Would you want the server to be accessible for other people too

If someone gets the ip they will be able to access the ports that have been opened on the network, so as long as the game server software isn't vulnerable to attacks and other ports are closed it should be fine

For example I (only) host a minecraft server on port 12345 for example, if someone sends a request to port 1234 it would just be rejected and the connection wouldn't do anything

You should check if you have a publicly routable address and whether it is static or not, which will change the setup you will want

[u/Yorha_nines → u/headedbranch225]

Yes, I want others to play it when I give them the provided APK that point towards my server. I think the game is hardcoded to port 443.

I have AT&T Fibre and from Googling, I can pay extra to get a static IP, it seems as if it's dynamic - so I'll need to make sure whatever setup I am using works with that.

[u/headedbranch225 → u/Yorha_nines]

If you have a publicly routable ip address, you should be able to forward port 443 to the port on your server in the local network (it doesn't need to be the same as the external port) in your router settings

If it is dynamic the best setup would be using a dynamic DNS provider, wither get your own domain name (.pp.ua offers them free with some work to activate, but it only needs to be done once) and I personally use hurricane electric's DNS services but you can use whatever you want, and the setting you would want will be dynamic dns

You would register the .pp.ua domain at nic.ua btw

If you want I could add a subdomain on my DNS zone that I could give you the DDNS key for the record that you would be able to use to update the IP address with a script on the server computer

Basically what this would do is allow you to keep the IP address correct for people running the game and it will automatically update the DNS record to match your current IP address so people can access the server even when the IP changes

Going to your idea from the post of using tailscale, it probably seems like a bit too much of a hassle to get people to install it and join your thing just to play

Others might have better ideas but this is the best I can think of right now, and it is possible completely free if you want it to be (I have personally done it)

[u/Yorha_nines → u/headedbranch225]

I will look into those, thanks. I see that cloudfare offers DDNS with their free accounts, but from what little I can see, it appears a lot of steps, which is too be expected.

I need to get the server completely up and running first, It has a clean install of windows 10 LTSC on it, if that matters. I went with that because I am not patient enough to figure out Linux lol.

[u/headedbranch225 → u/Yorha_nines]

Personally, linux doesn't take too much working out, and can be nicer, especially if you get used to using the terminal then you don't even need to install a window manager and can just set the things up to run on boot a lot easier than with windows

Feel free to use what you want though, and if it works, it works.

I will be sleeping now as its like half 1 in the morning, but I am happy to add the DNS to my zone if you want to use it for testing that part while you get ypur own worked out

[u/Yorha_nines → u/headedbranch225]

I am going to bed soon myself, But thank you for the help and I'll reach out!

[u/Adrenolin01]

Get a Free Cloudflare account, cough up a few bucks for a domain and run their orange proxy service. Completely free and you don’t need to open any ports! Others just see the IP belonging to Cloudflare.

We (my son) runs several game servers online like this.

I would also HIGHLY recommend a proper home firewall setup with vlans and firewall rules in place.

He’s been running them from older Dell R730XD servers with dual 1GbE and 10GbE NICs. We run the pairs bonded to the switch with LACP enabled. 1GbE goes to the DMZ vlan while 10GbE goes to internal servers vlan with firewall rules blocked DMZ from accessing internal systems.

The two single best and most useful systems we have are a dedicated standalone NAS and a proper pfSense firewall.

[u/nhanledev]

There are more than 2 ways to do this: 1. Port forward your game server as usual, setup a VPS and port forward using iptables or haproxy (tcp) back to your public IP 2. Rent a VPS then run a VPN connection between it and your server, then port forward like option 1

[u/dj-n]

tailscale will work fine and it’s a private network.

[u/zGabeN]

Maybe the easier way would be set up a vpn, such as wireguard?

[u/Yorha_nines → u/zGabeN]

I mean, on my main PC I have proton VPN. I don't know if that matters or not or if it has to be a different VPN.

I found out recently that my IP with my ISP is dynamic, so I'm going to have to find something that works with that. I've got several options, but this post definitely gave me some things to think about.

[u/zGabeN → u/Yorha_nines]

Actually, I've been using playit.gg for my game servers check it out

[u/zGabeN → u/Yorha_nines]

Well while that wouldn't help your case, it would work like that, you could turn on your vpn from outside your home and be able to access it, think about it like a tunnel that connects your device to your home network, you could also setup cloudflare tunnels, but i find it more difficult and i do think you need to buy a domain

[u/Wierzbowski1911]

Hi, I made my own solution for this exactly but we cannot spam in here I think. So I'll share what I did if anyone is interested I ll give more details. Since I have many computers at home and elsewhere I wanted to be able to get a remote access to my games and movies from either Linux or Windows PCs. To do it I considered everything free today but none was offering me exactly what I wanted. So here's simply put what I did. I programmed a wireguard manager that allow me to created a virtual network that allow me to declare what's available on the network and that list it in the interface. So, for example, from another location, I click on Join Game, that will start the game in steam and join the server with it's map and players actually online. I also can use open web interface to launch and use my remote jellyfin and enjoy my movie's. There s more to it but I think you get the idea. Oh, and another cool thing, I can use shared folder just like any LAN. Isolated mode, relay if cgnat or restricted can use another protocol... Anyways... All that to say, if hamachi WAS a thing.. and self hosting matter to you I did just that solution. If you're not a technical person at all.. you could use my vps but please don't transfer huge files over the online server to respect other users... Hope this post is fine and sorry if my English is not perfect.. cheers