Before we get into the nitty gritty of the actual setup, there are a few things
that you need to be aware of.
THE RISKS
If you are running any kind of server live on the Internet,
you are vulnerable. Not just the server that you are running, but all the other
computers and laptops etc that you have on your network are all vulnerable too.
Sadly out there in the big wide world called the Internet
there are people that have nothing better to do than to try and hack into
servers, and if you are not properly protected their next victim could be you.
Usually the damage that they do is not destructive because
they don't want to take your machine down, they want to use it for their own purposes.
Unknown to you they will compromise it with a Trojan and use it to send out spam emails or
to launch DDOS attacks on other large corporations that they are trying to blackmail.
Naturally you don't want to be a part of this and in order
to completely rid yourself of infection I would always recommend a full rebuild
or at least re-imaging of an infected machine rather than cleaning a virus. Again, not something
that you want to have to do too often, and if you take precautions you can largely prevent
yourself from being put at such risks.
Why are you at such risk?
Because your GPL server will be running live on the internet and waiting for
people to connect to it.
What you need to do is to ensure that only legitimate people
you want are connected to it and accessing only what you want them to. How do we do that?
We make our GPL server available on specific ports. Ports that either GPL
or iGOR use to communicate while racing in Multiplayer mode.
We will return to Ports later, first we need to think about how GPLers will
find your server out of all the other servers on the Internet.
