Post: #1

So it looks like one of the recent "classic" client patches (7.0.24+ or 7.0.25+) has hard-coded the "LoginServer=login.ultimaonline.com,7776" into the client.exe binary... so if you want to make these clients work with a sphere server, you need to do a couple things:

1. You need to redirect the DNS name "login.ultimaonline.com" to resolve to your shard's DNS name or IP. Do do this, in Linux you edit the "/etc/hosts" file, and in windows you edit the "\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts" file (for a more complete explanation check out How to edit a hosts file.)

There are also a couple other configuration requirements:

1. Your sphereserver needs to accept login traffic on port 7776. There are several ways to handle this... you can change the port of your shard to 7776, or configure your router to translate the port from 7776 to 2593 (or whatever your shard uses), or you can install "rinetd" on the sphereserver itself to redirect the port (this essentially lets your server listen on both.)
2. Your sphereserver needs to accept encrypted clients (this means you must have UseCrypt=1 in the Sphere.ini file.)
3. Your sphereserver needs to have all the new client encryption keys in the sphereCrypt.ini file.

The crummy thing about this is explaining to your players how to edit their hosts file... if you screw up that file you are in trouble so make a backup first.

On the bright side, client 7.0.26.4 works nicely :-)