I’m facing a peculiar issue and hoping someone can shed some light on it.
My friends and I are trying to get some classic Star Wars Battlefront 2 (from 2005) LAN action going using Zerotier. The setup is pretty straightforward: we’re all on a Zerotier network. The only wrinkle is that I’m on Linux, running the game through Wine, while everyone else is on Windows 10. We can all ping each other, and remote access tools like Anydesk work flawlessly across the Zerotier network.
When a Windows user hosts a game, my Linux machine is the odd one out – I simply can’t see the server in the game lobby. Conversely, if I host a server from my Linux machine, nobody else can see or join it. Interestingly, when I boot into Windows on the same machine (dual-boot setup), everything works perfectly. This points away from a general network issue and more towards something specific to my Linux environment.
Initially, I suspected Wine might be the culprit. To test this, I brought my second PC (Windows 10) into my local LAN and hosted a game there. Surprisingly, my Linux machine could see and join this server. This seemed to rule out Wine as the primary cause.
To further isolate the issue, I switched my second PC to Wi-Fi and connected it to my smartphone hotspot. This effectively simulated a friend playing from outside my local network. Both PCs joined the same Zerotier network, ping and Anydesk worked as expected, but the problem resurfaced: my Linux machine couldn’t detect the game server hosted on the Windows machine connected via the hotspot.
This led me to consider if there might be an issue with Zerotier on Linux itself. To test this, I tried a different game within the same Zerotier setup. In this other game, my Linux machine could see and join servers hosted on Windows. This other game happens to use DirectPlay, an older Windows networking API, but I’m unsure if this is relevant to the problem with Battlefront 2.
Here are a few additional observations and troubleshooting steps I’ve already taken:
- Firewalls are disabled: Firewalls are deactivated on all devices to eliminate them as a potential blocking factor.
- Windows Metric Configuration: We noticed in the past that for Windows machines to see Zerotier hosted servers in some games, the automatic metric in the IPv4 configuration under Windows needed to be set to ‘1’. Intriguingly, this wasn’t necessary in my local LAN setup on Linux. However, to be thorough, I attempted to replicate this metric configuration on my Linux machine for the Zerotier connection. I used the following commands, which seemed to indicate the metric was successfully changed:
**sudo nmcli connection modify zerotier_name ipv4.route-metric 1**
**sudo nmcli connection up zerotier_name**
**sudo nmcli device modify zerotier_name ipv4.route-metric 1**
**sudo nmcli device up zerotier_name**Verifying with **route -n** showed the metric had indeed changed to ‘1’. However, this adjustment unfortunately didn’t resolve the issue of my Linux machine not seeing the Battlefront 2 server. It’s worth noting that the default configuration doesn’t display any metric value for the Zerotier connection on Linux.
At this point, I’m running out of ideas and would greatly appreciate any suggestions or insights from the community. What could be preventing my Linux machine from seeing the Star Wars Battlefront 2 server hosted on Windows machines over Zerotier, despite other games working and basic network connectivity being confirmed?
