Setting up a beta Counter-Strike server under Linux

Setting up a beta Counter-Strike server is allmost the same as setting up the more recent 1.5 servers which I have
already fully described here.

It's very important that you read the 1.5 server setup first, before you start reading this part. The basics of starting up a server
are already mentioned before, so I will keep this installation guide short and briefly.

The following installation guide is only usefull if you want to install a beta Counter-Strike 5.2 or beta Counter-Strike 6.1 server.
I have no experience with older beta's, and therefor I cannot guarantee that this installtion guide will work for those as well.

The following installation is for a beta Counter-Strike 5.2 server:

1.  login@server:/var/home/login$
2.  cd /usr/local/games
3.  mkdir halflife
4.  cd halflife
5.  tar zxvf hlds_l3016.tar.gz
6.  cd hlds_l
7.  tar zxvf cs_beta52.tar.gz

And this is the installation for the beta Counter-Strike 6.1 server:

1.  login@server:/var/home/login$
2.  cd /usr/local/games
3.  mkdir halflife
4.  cd halflife
5.  tar zxvf hlds_l3016.tar.gz
6.  cd hlds_l
7.  tar zxvf cs_beta61.tar.gz

Again you can finetune your motd.txt and your server.cfg in your /hlds_l/cstrike/ directory, using vi or pico.

But now comes the tricky part. Due to the fact that these older beta's run on an older Half-Life dedicated server, they
cannot connect to the WON network anymore. What this means, is that the server cannot get public, but could only be
played on when running on a LAN. Luckily enough some guys wrote a little script called "lan_fw" which bypasses the WON
network, and makes your server public to the internet.

You can download this little script here.

The script is not very difficult to use. The standard command line looks like this:

./lan_fw &

Then it will use the standard setting of port 27015 for your server.

You can also specify your own port which you would the beta to run on. The command would then look like this:

lan_fw <internal port> <external port>

where internal port is the UDP port you tell hlds to listen to with the -port command and <external port> is the UDP port the
forwarder listens to and that is accessible to the public.

So if I wanted to run a server on port 27055 on internal port 29055, the command would look like this:

./lan_fw 29055 27055 & 

You can run as many lan_fw scripts on one server as you like. Just enter different ports for each game you want to start up, and
the lan_fw will take care of the rest.

eg. you want 3 servers running on ports 27025, 27035 and 27055 the command would look like:

./lan_fw 29025 27025 &
./lan_fw 29035 27035 &
./lan_fw 29055 27055 &

The only disadvantage about this lan_fw script, is that now your not connected to the WON network anymore, the
people that are connected to the server don't have a WONID. Without this WONID it is impossible to ban players from your server.
So when you have you beta server on FF on, and some "funny" guy starts to TK and TW everyone, you can only kick him
and not ban him for good.

I also run a beta 5.2 server and a beta 6.1 server, and I have decided to put FF off cause I lost control with kicking players when
they start to TK or TW.

One thing that comes extra with this lan_fw script are the following extra cvar's for the server startup line.

sv_lan 1
-port 29055 (or whatever port you decide to run the server on)

The lan_fw script will only work with the hlds_l3016.tar.gz release.

Having the lan_fw part done, we can continue again with starting up the server.

Assuming that the servers would run under screen(like described at the Counter-Strike section ) the startup would look as the following:

1.  cd /usr/local/games/halflife/hlds_l
2.  screen
3.  export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/halflife/hlds_l:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
4.  ./lan_fw 29025 27025 &
5.  ./hlds_l -game cstrike +exec server.cfg +ip 192.168.10.11 -port 29025 +sv_lan 1 +maxplayers 16 +map de_railroad
6.  CTRL a + d (detached)

Notice that with the beta 5.2 and beta 6.1 release, the startup line begins with ./hlds_l instead of ./hlds_run like with the 1.5 servers.

With the above guide about the lan_fw script and the beta releases, it's nog very easy again to run multiple beta servers on one machine.
Just let your lan_fw command point to another port and put in in the startup line.

An example:

1.  export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/halflife/hlds_l:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
2.  ./lan_fw 29025 27025 &
3.  ./hlds_l -game cstrike +exec server.cfg +ip 192.168.10.11 -port 29025 +sv_lan 1 +maxplayers 16 +map de_railroad
4.  CTRL a + d (detached)

1.  export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/halflife/hlds_l:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
2.  ./lan_fw 29035 27035 &
3.  ./hlds_l -game cstrike +exec server.cfg +ip 192.168.10.11 -port 29035 +sv_lan 1 +maxplayers 16 +map cs_iraq
4.  CTRL a + d (detached)

1.  export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/halflife/hlds_l:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
2.  ./lan_fw 29055 27055 &
3.  ./hlds_l -game cstrike +exec server.cfg +ip 192.168.10.11 -port 29055 +sv_lan 1 +maxplayers 16 +map de_dust
4.  CTRL a + d (detached)

The above settings about running multiple servers are only tested by me on beta Counter-Strike servers 5.2 and 6.1

If you have any problem with setting up such a server you can contact me using the forum