Deprecated Darkstar fourms

I've scoured the forum and read up on as many posts as I could find related to the zoneip/hairpin dynamic. I'm hoping I have my head properly wrapped around how it should go. If I don't, perhaps someone could correct my faulty logic?

So here's the setup: I have a desktop I'm going to use as the server and possibly a client. I have two other computers on the LAN that will be clients, one of which will also be connecting from outside the LAN at times. A friend's computer will be connecting from outside the LAN, and at times from the inside.

Everything I read seemed to say that because I've got computers coming from outside the network, the ZoneIP needs to be set to the public IP to allow for the external connections. The client-only computers inside the network can go straight across the LAN to the server if they use the hairpin hack (and Ashita can store multiple connection profiles, so it's just a matter of giving the roaming computers a LAN config with --hairpin and a public config without). The client that would run on the server computer would go to localhost without a need for --hairpin.

Am I close?

Everything inside the network (on the LAN) will need to use the --hairpin option. For your buddy that connects from inside and outside, he will need to use the --hairpin when he is inside.

The zoneIP should be the WAN IP of your router if you want people to connect from outside.

If the connections are 100% inside (LAN only), then make the zoneIP the LAN IP, and no --hairpin is needed.

pretty sure you were right (the zoneip would be public IP)

Hairpin is mainly for the person hosting the server.

For the person hosting the server they need to use their external (WAN) IP address. They use the hairpin fix to force their client to still connect using the internal IP address. (Either 127.0.0.1 if hosted on the same machine, or their allocated router address for the internal LAN IP) so that they do not need to do any external connecting to the server.

All players outside of the LAN have to use the external WAN IP to connect to the server.

Ah okay, so connecting to 127.0.0.1 still needs the hairpin if the ZoneIP is set to public. At least my logic wasn't too far off on the rest of it. Thanks for all the help, I really appreciate it

A few days later, and the server is up and running like a charm. It took actually trying to do the connections to see what Atom0s was talking about, but the way he described it was spot-on.

I can't thank everybody enough for all the help with this. Hopefully I'll be able to provide the same help the next time it comes up

Not a problem, glad you get things going.