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HOWTO.md

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Compiling

If you haven't compiled a Go program before, the following are some brief instructions to help you compile ipxbox on a Linux-based system.

First, install the Go compiler and the development package for libpcap. On a Debian-based system this will work:

sudo apt install golang libpcap-dev

Next set $GOPATH. This can usually be pointed at a directory inside your home directory:

export GOPATH=$HOME/go

You may find it convenient to add the above line to ~/.bashrc.

The following two commands will fetch ipxbox and all its dependencies, and then compile it:

go get github.com/skadarnold/ipxbox
go build github.com/skadarnold/ipxbox

If successful, you should now have a compiled binary you can run named ipxbox.

Starting a server

To test your server, you can try running it with:

./ipxbox --port=10000

The server will run on UDP port 10000 until you hit ctrl-c. Try connecting to it from inside DOSbox. For example, if your server is running locally you can specify localhost as the address to connect to:

Z:\>config -set ipx true
Z:\>ipxnet connect localhost 10000
IPX Tunneling utility for DosBox

IPX Tunneling Client connected to server at localhost.

Z:\>

If you see that you were able to connect successfully as above, you now know that the server is working correctly.

If you are trying to connect to a remote machine and it is failing, the following are two possible causes:

  1. If the server is running on a home network, you may need to set up a port forward. Google search port forwarding to find out more about this subject - the way to do it depends on your router.

  2. Check if a firewall is set up on the machine you are trying to connect to. If there is, you may need to add a firewall exception. Linux firewalls use iptables, and the following is an example of how to add an exception:

sudo iptables -A INPUT --dport 10000 -p udp -j ACCEPT

Setting up a systemd service

Once you have your server working you may want to set up a systemd service for it. This ensures that if the machine/VM restarts, the server will automatically restart. In the following example we are setting up a service running as the user jonny.

First create a systemd configuration file. You'll need to point the ExecStart path at your executable.

mkdir -p ~/.config/systemd/user
cat >~/.config/systemd/user/ipxbox.service <<END
[Unit]
Description=DOSbox dedicated server

[Service]
ExecStart=/home/jonny/ipxbox/ipxbox --enable_syslog
Restart=on-failure

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target
END

Enable login lingering for jonny. This allows the server to run even when jonny isn't logged in.

sudo loginctl enable-linger jonny

Start the server and enable it as a service that will start automatically.

systemctl --user start ipxbox.service
systemctl --user enable ipxbox.service

Check it is running as expected:

$ systemctl --user status ipxbox.service
● ipxbox.service - DOSbox dedicated server
   Loaded: loaded (/home/jonny/.config/systemd/user/ipxbox.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled
   Active: active (running) since Sun 2020-02-16 00:00:51 GMT; 3 weeks 6 days ago
 Main PID: 5383 (ipxbox)
   CGroup: /user.slice/user-1001.slice/user@1001.service/ipxbox.service
           └─5383 /home/jonny/ipxbox/ipxbox

Advanced topics

Once you have a server running there are various additional features that can be configured:

  • Bridging the server to a real network (see BRIDGE-HOWTO).
  • Enabling the built-in PPTP server (see PPTP-HOWTO).