Complete SRCDS linux install guide including IPTABLES rules

[FuriouS]

I have created a guide on linux SRCDS server installation on a Red Hat variant of Linux. (CentOS, Fedora, Red Hat).

I recommend CentOS as it's free and very stable.

http://www.freenerd.net/index.php?title=Linux_SRCDS_server

I built this as a reference for myself, but it's helped quite a few friends of mine get their Linux servers online as well. I posted this originally as a Fedora Core 6 guide in these forums, the guide is now more complete and easy to use.

The guide does not cover how to NAT the steam ports in to your game server IP, or how to protect your home network by placing the game server IP into a DMZ. The guide does cover how to launch the game as a service, and as a non root privileged user.

Suggestions on what the guide is missing are appreciated.

[pengy]

On useradd it defaults as /home/username and the shell is default to bash
So it should be useradd newuser
Your always going to have the uncompress error on new installs of centos.
You probably want the -dir to be /home/username/srcds
-A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT Should be
-A INPUT
For the hostname you are going to need quotes
Also you can add iptables infront of the -A and type it in ssh then run the command /sbin/iptables-save

Other than those problems, nice simple wiki

[FuriouS]

Thanks for the tip on the useradd command.

The username I run my server under is srcds, and that's all the account is for so I let the installation run in the /home/srcds directory. I have another account for administering the server so there is no need to place source game files in a sub directory.

The firewall lines were copy / pasted from a CentOS 5 firewall file. If I alter them from what's posted they IPTABLES fails to restart.

Thanks for the feedback. I have made several changes based on your recommendations and the guide seems to flow better now. I included the commands for installing ncompress and screen.i386 which are required vs. assuming users would know how yum worked.

Alternately I am looking at making a VMware srcds virtual appliance to allow anyone with VMWare server to quickly bring a srcds serve online. The only issue I am seeing so far is it takes SCSI Ultra 320 or SAS drives for the server not to lag when hosted virtually.

Looking for a way to force the entire Virtual machine to run in RAM on a stripped down Gentoo build, but it's not complete yet.