Setting up a second port for Pennmush
By sheer misfortune one of our players has the port we use for our MUSH blocked by his work IT. Most other ports are unblocked and we've identified a port that is available from our host and is unblocked by his work. The question is, can I configure Pennmush to use two ports, our existing one and also the unblocked port?
I'm entering this under hardcode as the closest (I think) category.
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Not really - Penn can only be
Not really - Penn can only be configured to listen for normal connections on a single port. However, you can also have it set to listen on another port for SSL-encrypted connections, if you don't mind setting that up and the player in question is using a client that supports SSL connections. Not sure how much work it would be to hack in support for multiple ports, if you wanted to go that route - grep for TINYPORT in bsd.c if you want to try it.
Thanks.
Thank you for a very speedy reply. I'll look at the SSL option. I'm not anywhere good enough with C to hack at the hardcode.
tunnel
If you're using a Linux or BSD-based system, you can create a tunnel. Probably one of the easiest ways to do so with a plain user account is to ssh to the same host to do port forwarding.
ssh -gN -L 0.0.0.0:NEW_PORT:127.0.0.1:MUSH_PORT localhost
Replace NEW_PORT with the new port you want your friend to connect to, and MUSH_PORT with the port your mush is running on.
Note that this has one caveat: Anybody connecting via NEW_PORT will look like they're logging in from localhost. So if you check WHO, then anyone logged in via NEW_PORT will have "localhost" or "127.0.0.1" as their source. Since this can bork sitelock stuff, I recommend only sharing NEW_PORT with those who need it, and not making it public. (Otherwise, a twink can connect via NEW_PORT, and you'll end up needing to block localhost.) - A good workaround for this might be to @sitelock 127.0.0.1=!create - Prevent anybody logging in locally from creating characters, but allow them to log in.