Hack Tool Detected - my experience and resolution.

[sharza]

This is not a support request. I had a problem which I tried to solve using a lot of usefull posts from this and other forums, however none solved my issue. I have searched around for duplicate posts, so please forgive me if I've overlooked some.

I had the server up and running. Clients from WAN could connect and play. Clients from LAN could not, they would be refused with a Hack Tool detected error upon trying to connect to the gameserver (loginserver no problem).

The latest post I could find, Hope instructed to add below line to hosts file:

66.240.255.107 nprotect.lineage2.com

Just a note about that - for some reason, when I did that on Windows 7 x64, the system went haywire upon attempting to startup lineage client. As soon as gameguard launched, 3-5 running processes (random every time) crashed instantly. I removed the line and those particular problems went away.

However on to the resolution... simple as it may seem was to add an additional IP to the gameservers NIC. I choose the SEA servers IP 116.68.136.61/24. Then added an IP in the same subnet range to clients (e.g. 116.68.136.60/24). Local clients then use the new 116.68.136.61 IP to connect to the gameserver.

It seems that gameguard does not in any way like connections to servers residing in the local subnet. It's probably a hack detection implemented to counter various bots relying on emulating loginservers for intercepting in-game packets the man-in-the-middle way.

I am in no way a L2J guru - more correctly I'm a L2J newbie, so this may have been posted 1000 times before (just I hasn't been able to find it), so bear with me if that is the case and just delete this post. If not this may be a usefull resolution for some. It works with retail gameguard (no need to put any gameguard entries in hosts file).

Cheers.

- Sharza

[hope]

you will find that windows 7 does not work well with client if you change host file but it can be done you will also need to edit your lmhosts file as well

[sharza]

So far there is no problems. It seems that the major problem was related to the IP being on a directly connected subnet, which was detected by gameguard. Using the Lineage SEA IP should make it quite difficult for GG to detect that we are on the same local network.

LMhosts is for netbios resolution and is not interesting as lineage does not use netbios.

Windows 7 does not work differently than any previous version of Windows with regards to the hosts file.

[hope]

could never use my windows 7 pc could never get it to login to my server no matter what i changed so had to use my other pc
hope you get it working

[sharza]

Actually it is working now without any problems.

When you modify the hosts file you basicly just manually alters the DNS cache (all hosts file entries are added to the DNS cache with the values you specify), and the DNS cache is the first place windows tries to resolve a hostname. So the only thing you changes by adding entries to the hosts file is the target IP of a hostname. (but I'm sure you know this already).

I do not see how the client connecting to one or the other address should affect the client operation itself, so that it behaves differently on different OS'es.

If anyone tries this solution here for local servers, please post your results, as I'm quite interested in wether it works for others (also on Windows 7) too or not.