LINUX SMAUG Server

I live in the US. I'm new at all of this. I've got several old computers and access to a lot of bandwidth and the fastest Internet that can be bought in my area. I'd like to host a MUD for my youngest brothers and their friends to play and build on because I enjoyed it when I was their age. I played on a SMAUG server for years and ended up as the asst. administrator because I built most of the areas used in the MUD myself. So I have lots of experience with area editing and some of the admin commands like race building etc. But I have no coding experience.

What would be the easiest way for me to host a SMAUG server?

Is there a SMAUG program available for Linux?

Is there a tutorial that will walk me through setting up the server, step by step from the very basics?

I have a MacBook pro with several virtual machines installed, including Linux and Windows XP. I have several old PCs with windows discs and licenses. I have access to the router and firewall and can do basic port forwarding.

I'd prefer to host on Linux because I'm just learning to use it.

But if there's an easy tutorial for windows then whatever.

Please post back. :-)

Did you read this?

http://www.gammon.com.au/smaug/howtocompile.htm

Smaug compiles fine under Linux. That's what it is made to work with basically.

Try here for the latest source:

http://www.smaugmuds.org/

Thanks a lot! Great tutorials here! I got SMAUG running and it's working on my local network.

My brothers are very curious after seeing it last night. They want to play, but there is a firewall where I live that restricts incoming traffic.

Is there any way I could make some kind of telnet or ssh tunnel for them?

I tried something like ssh myip -R 4000:theirip:4000
OS Username
Password

And then had them try telnet myip 4000 but it didn't work.

If there really is a firewall you may be in trouble, but you certainly need port forwarding.

http://portforward.com/

Otherwise the router won't send the incoming request to your PC.

I'm familiar with port forwarding using a routers ip and login to punch holes in the firewall. This is a simple Linksys router and ive set up VNC on one just like it on another network. But I was under the impression that you could create some type of reverse SSH tunnel without having to change router settings.

I just don't know enough about SSH and telnet to figure it out.

Well I got it to work in the end testing between a couple of local machines. One was Linux running Smaug, the other was a Windows PC.

First, your brothers need to have sshd (SSH daemon) running on their PCs so they can accept incoming calls.

I found this worked, after mucking around for about half an hour (I hope they are tech-heads!).

http://chinese-watercolor.com/LRP/printsrv/cygwin-sshd.html

They need to download and install Cygwin for a start and make sure you get the ssh package as part of the Cygwin install.

They also need to make sure they have a Windows account and password (ie. not password-less). This is so that ssh can actually connect to name/password.

Once all is done (and they have added the CYGWIN environment variable etc.) they should test by trying to connect to themselves, like this:



If they don't get that far they need to tweak away until they do.

So they should ultimately be able to connect and disconnect from their own PC like this:



Once you get that far, you can set up the tunnel on *your* PC (the Smaug server) like this:



Now (if that worked) your brother connects to "localhost" port 10002 on his PC, and that should tunnel through to your server. In other word, localhost:10002 on his PC tunnels through to localhost:4000 (the Smaug server) on your PC (two different localhosts).

The meanings of the flags are:

• -n : Don't read from stdin as we will be in the background
  
• -N : Do not execute a remote command
  
• -f : Fork a background process
  
• -R : Tunnel remoteport:host:hostport (ie. port 10002 on his PC, port 4000 on your PC)
  
• mybrother@remote_ip : connect to username "mybrother" at site "remote_ip"

Once set up that background tunnel (on your PC) should be sitting there connected to your brother's PC (or PCs, if you do it more than once) accepting their attempts to play the game. It asks you for his password in order to make the secure connection to his PC. Maybe he would want to set up an account for you to tunnel into rather than disclosing his main password.

[EDIT]

I should point out, too, that the client PCs (your brothers) will need to open up their firewalls to allow incoming connections for SSH (port 22) so that the sshd can accept them from outside. And they may need to port forward port 22 from their router to their PC as well.

For more help running the server check out the Wiki-style pages here generated from the Smaug help files:

http://www.gammon.com.au/forum/bbshowpost.php?bbtopic_id=115

In particular, the index is helpful:

http://www.gammon.com.au/forum/?wiki=index

This is great. Perused hours of other forums for this info and found nothing as comprehensive. Thank you very much for taking the time to do the research. This should be fun to try.