DirectPlay Masquerading Module

Welcome to the DirectPlay Masquerading Module homepage. This page is intended to provide you with information about and access to this particular Linux ip_masq module.

08/21/2001

Wow, five months without even looking at this project. That's really pathetic. I should be shot.
Finally, somebody has ported one of the 2.2.x masquerading modules over to the 2.4.x iptables system. Or rather, finally I NOTICED. Anyway, with the new(?) ip_nat_ftp module out there to copy fro^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H inspire me, there's a slight possibility that the dplay module might get ported within the decade.
So yah, I am still alive, this project is still on life-support, and as usual I have no real information for anybody :)

03/30/2001

An apology to all those who might have e-mailed me about various things regarding the module, or anyone visiting this page in general :) With school and work I haven't much had the time to even update the page to tell anybody about all the things that I'm not doing. At this point I go weeks at a time without even checking anything but my school e-mail.
It is unlikely I will take this project much farther, considering the new DirectPlay in DirectX 8.0 will work fine on any NAT system without the need for additional support. While this doesn't help for older games, it does mean that I am unwilling to spend the time on what is essentially an obsolete item.
I will do my best to answer questions about the existing module, help anyone with their attempts to code additional DirectPlay or ip_masq type projects, and try very very hard to get a 2.4.x kernel version of the existing module out someday :)
Finally, to those of you who were hoping for GameVoice support: I imagine that it will not be long before MicroSoft converts GameVoice to DirectX 8.0, thereby taking advantage of the NAT-friendly features of the DirectX 8.0 DirectPlay system. If they haven't done it yet, then e-mail them and ask them why not!

01/22/2001

I haven't finished looking at DirectPlay 8.0 yet, but I did take a peek at the 2.4.x kernel and they have apparently moved the masquerading functionality from separate masquerading modules into the extended NAT capabilities of the new Netfilter system. This means the module will have to be rewritten to a fair extent before it will work on 2.4.x. The upside is that the new Netfilter system seems to be well documented from a developers point of view, which should make the transition and future development much easier.
On that note, most future releases (assuming I get enough time to make any future releases) will likely be targetted to the 2.4.x kernels. Even more likely is that the very next thing I release will be a 2.4.x version, and not an update to the existing 2.2.x version.

01/10/2001

Well I finally got a chance to look at the DirectX 8.0 version of DirectPlay, and it bodes well for gamers and poorly for this module :) Assuming new programmers don't do anything REALLY stupid, new games targetted at DirectX 8.0 and above should be completely firewall/NAT friendly.
On the downside, EXISTING games benefit little from the changes made in DirectPlay 8.0. There are a few differences I've noticed (such as outgoing traffic now leaves from one of the 2300-2400 ports, which means each game potentially takes up FOUR local 2300-2400 ports now). I will finish writing my test DirectPlay application and try to verify that DirectPlay 8.0 really will be firewall/NAT friendly. If it proves to be, then I will probably do little to improve this module.

12/31/2000

Happy New Year everybody! As you may have noticed, I've once again been out of touch lately :) Just finished my finals recently (which kept me nice and harried).
I've setup a public mailing list for this module. The purpose of this list is for people who use the module to communicate with each other, and so that I can make important annoucements. Only subscribed members can post to the list. To subscribe, just go here.

10/26/2000

The newest version, 0.3.00, is out! Go to the download section to grab it.
This version adds the ability to see the module settings and active connections from the /proc/ filesystem structure. Thanks to Matthias Tichy for the bulk of the code used for the proc_fs support.

10/25/2000

So far it seems that anyone running Make version 3.77 will get the compile error on line 15. I've gotten at least one report that upgrading from 3.77 to 3.78 will result in a successful compile (yay!). Personally, I'm using 3.79. I don't know if the compile error ocurrs on earlier versions of make as well, or just 3.77. You can find out what version of make you have by entering "make --version" at the command line. The latest version of GNU Make can be found at this website.
If you are NOT using Make version 3.77 and are STILL getting the makefile error, please let me know. Include in your e-mail the version of make you are using ("make --version") and the version of egrep you are using ("egrep --version").