Oddness with Specific Servers!!!

[Baker]

The Bomber server mysteriously doesn't seem to let certain players connect to it. This is known, and it's not many players. See Bomber Plot Thickens

This problem does NOT affect ANY of the numerous Essentrix servers (shmack, fear, bda, etc.). Nor does it affect Intertex, IHOC, the HDZ servers or the Clan of Rum servers.

But .... there are a few other server that have this issue.

Known affected servers based on some tests I did:

Bomber
BlackHat (Europe)
GCHQ (Europe)
Topsid (Europe)

Users trying to connect to the above servers may get a "Connection Accepted" problem totally unrelated to the traditional version of that problem.

Is this a firewall issue on the part of those server hosts? Or is it something else?

I discovered that I also am affected by the issue, although I personally can work around it quite easily, but the solution is complicated enough that somehow this mystery needs to be solved.

[Baker]

To me, the DMZ method is insecure. Others could hack your computer (unlikely, but unlikely things happen). That's why I didn't mention it.

The port forward method that I indicate is secure, it's only UDP packets.

[born4trance]

i can also work around this problem, but then i would need to put the cliënt pc in DMZ which i try to avoid. I might try your way of port forwarding (0 - 65535), but isn't that kind of big port-range you got there