Discussion Need help with networking for Ark Survival Ascended, Odd Server Behavior.

[Chainsaw787]

I'm hosting an ark server for a group along side some other game servers. My current setup is a windows machine at home hosting the game servers and using Zerotier to connect the PC to a VPS running Ubuntu hosting a Caddy with the L4 module.

All my other game servers with this setup work perfectly, except for a small issue with ARK Survival Ascended. It shows up in the server browser but it always gives a "Joining Failed, Connection timed out" error every time you try and join, UNLESS you manually connect via the "open IP : PORT" command. Then it lets you join and play just fine.

On a direct LAN connection to the server everything works as its supposed to.

Outside connections coming in have this issue "Joining Failed, Connection timed out".

I noticed Nitrado (of which this save is migrated from) uses a HTTP Listener Override config in the Engine.ini file of the game, however my config shows the HTTP listener bound to 127.0.0.1, and using the config in the Engine.ini to change it to port 8888 which is what's already opened for it by default, and the IP to the Zerotier IP. It doesn't seem to change anything.

I've also tried using different Caddy Configs thinking something wasn't configured right, to no avail.

 

[bill001g]

You have a complex setup not sure someone here will know the details.

Do you have the ability to test this yourself. Note testing from the same internal network using the external IP adds a new set of strange issues related to what is called hairpin nat.
If you could test via a hotspot on your phone that might be a option....assuming it gets the same error.

All I can do is provide general troubleshooting for stuff I have never seen. What you want to do is run wireshark on the remote machine. The goal is to figure out what is different when you try to connect and it fails and the connection you use the open command.

I suspect it using a port other than the one you have forwarded.

You might start out with a brute force capture to be sure it is not talking to the wrong IP. Might get lots of data so a filter with just your external IP might help but again a filter might hide the real problem if the application is trying some other IP.

 

[Chainsaw787]

Testing with the hotspot is actually one of the first things I tried, and I did get the same error.

I did a thorough check my configs to make sure I wasn't missing anything and everything should be good. Although in doing that I found something interesting that using "netstat -aon" on my game server host machine. The query port I have open doesn't seem to be used at all for the ark server, just the one game port and RCON. That being said, it's working on LAN still... Interesting...

I'm very new to Linux let alone using Wireshark on Linux. But I do think that may tell me exactly what's going on.

 

[bill001g]

The wireshark app itself looks the same...If you have to do something special to get it to capture traffic I don't know. Linux has a native command that will capture traffic into a file. Been a long times since I messed with that.

Do you run linux on the client machine or just the server. You want to run wireshark on the client. Best if you could compare what it looks like when you run on the lan and when it is running though the hotspot.