Questions[gameserver](server)

How do online multiplayer games which use UDP get the packets delivered between networks over the internet? From what I understand, clients would have to enable port forwarding on their routers in order for the packets to arrive at their computer. Is this what big online games (WoW, Diablo, etc) require players to do?

For example, I recently created a server that handles udp traffic. It just echos back whatever a sender has sent. I deployed this to a server on the internet. I can only get the echos back to the sender after enabling port forwarding, but this will not work if there are two senders on the same local network.

One of our dedicated machines we use for hosting in London has exceeded the CPU usage, so I contacted the datacenter last week for a quote on an upgrade. We are hosting game servers, and most of these are single core applications.

Our current processor is the Q9550. They are offering us the Q9650 for 230$/mo or the i7-870 for 250$/mo. Since our customers are pushing the machine to nearly 100% CPU usage at peak times, which machine would we be better off going with? The Q9650 is a 3GHZ and the i7-870 is 2.93ghz. The Q9650 has a nice fat 12MB L2 Cache, and the i7 has a smaller 8MB L3 Cache.

I doubt either one is going to be much of a difference at all from the other, but would the i7-870 be worth it for hosting game servers?

I want to create a crontab entry so that it starts screen, starts a gameserver and detaches. This is for in case the server is rebooted and I want it to automatically start this for me.

0 0 0 0 0 (command)

should run upon startup.

It runs a shell file located at ~/cube/server.sh

I am using Screen like this:

screen -L -dm -S session1 -c "./game_server -options"

to wrap around game servers. I log their output to a file and can send them input with:

screen -r session1 -p0 -X "stuff \"this into input^M\""

The timeout between log file flushes can be specified in the configuration file (10 seconds in my case).

The problem I have is that I can't force screen to flush output to the logfile. For example, after I send a "status" command to a game server, the game server prints some information, but it takes at least 10 seconds to add that to the log file.

I have tried sending:

screen -r session1 -p0 -X "logfile flush 1"

But it doesn't react to that. I've also tried flush 0 with no luck.

I wouldn't want to always log with a timeout of 1 second; it's only really needed after receiving a command. Note that I'm paranoid about performance here because the session is running a game server after all.

How can I force screen to flush output to the logfile? Is there a way to do what I need (log output to file and send commands to input) other than with screen, maybe with a FIFO?

Hey, Some script kiddies are crashing my clients' game servers (that are based on Linux). In order to serve the best service, I'm looking for a way to find what packets does the crashers send, so I can block it later.

So, I need a simple program, that will log every packet that sent or get to/from the server software, from ALL clients. As I said, the game server software is based on Linux (Ubuntu 9.10), so the program should support Linux. The game server software, is not open source.

Thanks.