Unable to connect to multiplayer game when using IPFire

This is a very specific problem, but wondering if there is a way to fix this with my limited networking/linux knowledge skills. Also wondering if anyone can recreate it or pehaps im just going insane.

I can not connect to any multiplayer Wreckfest game, and from everything i have tried ONLY that game is having problems when using IPFire. This started happening about 2 weeks ago, with no recent IPFire updates applied on my side(was still using x86 hardware). In troubleshooting i have even build a new IPFire machine out of another old PC and using x64 hardware and 169 the issues still occurs. Bypassing the firewall physically allows the game to work, using PFsence lets the game work. Friends can all play with their various setups, however they cannot connect to my hosted games if running through IPFire.

There have been game updates, and i have also tried contacting the developers to see what they changed. My guess is they changed something and just IPFire doesn’t like it. I don’t want to change my firewall to something else, i like IPFire and has worked well for me for years.

SO… any suggestions?

May need port forward to host game.

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Thanks for the response, when running a server for the game i did have the ports open and the server had been working for years.

Typing that all out made me think about versions… and when i looked up 153, the old one i was running, all sorts of problems popped up similar to this. Going to test if various other software to see if this is the same issue. as well as if i can tell what my MTU is… per this thread that doesn’t yet seem to be fixed. Google Meet Stopped Working After Core Update 152->153 - #103 by jon

Not sure if that’s true.
Core 165 update.
Blog post.

A long-standing bug with broken cable modems has been fixed: Some providers have cable modems which return an unusually small MTU of only 576 bytes which will cause that IPFire will fragment every packet larger than this before it can be sent out on the RED interface. This can now properly changed in the setup tool and IPFire will accept any custom value. This used to break video conferences over UDP which could not re-assemble the fragmented video stream and which did not automatically fall back to TCP (#12563).

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ya saw that, and then someone said it still wasn’t fixed? Going to take a look shortly. Will update what i find.

That bug has been marked as Closed-Fixed.

I haven’t seen that bug being re-opened or a new one being created. If someone believes the problem still exists they should open/reopen a bug and provide the data to support that assertion.

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Well just confirmed my MTU was 576… and commenting out the line “option interface_mtu” fixed MTU and my problem. I can now connect just fine to the game and my dedicated server which fixes my immediate problem of not being able to play this game this weekend at my LAN party. :slight_smile:

After this weekend i will do some more testing with different versions and settings and see if we can get a new bug report going.

The fix from the bug was thst you could define the mtu in the setup operation and dhcpcd would use the value defined. Previously, whatever you put in there dhcpcd could decide to ignore.

Did you define your mtu in the red setup page?

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I didn’t change any MTU setting during setup. I don’t remember if it was blank or if it had 1500 in there. Thanks for the explanation of that, i guess i didn’t understand thats how the issue was fixed. I will try a reinstall after the weekend and see what happens.

You don’t have to do a re-install.

From the console of from an ssh terminal window run the command setup.

This gives you the setup menu and then select Networking - Address settings - RED and then you get the RED window where you can select static, dhcp or ppp and there is also an entry for Force DHCP MTU and that is where you specify the mtu that you want/need. The fix now means that dhcpcd actually uses it, whereas in the past it would sometimes ignore the entry.

Then choose OK and go back up the menu tree and it will restart the networking and that mtu will be put into effect.

Good luck.

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Thanks again!