@ Dan Salvato:

I forgot to mention this. As a final step, type in:
sudo mv /usr/local/sbin/dgamelaunch /usr/sbin/dgamelaunch
If it gives you an error, don’t worry about it.

I hope someone reads this, because I’d have really needed it.

Ubuntulite (now U-lite) gave me all kinds of problems, so I just used regular Ubuntu. Here’s what I did differently from this tutorial:

1. Use dgamelaunch-1.4.6, even though it’s not the newest version. You’ll get an error when running dgl-create-chroot, as mentioned. However, instead of using that manual workaround, grab the dgl-create-chroot from dgamelaunch-1.4.7.

2. You have to modify dgamelaunch.conf and comment out these two lines:
shed_user = “games”
shed_group = “games”

3. The terminfo copying step is unnecessary. dgamelaunch does copy them, but in a different directory.

4. For adding the telnet line to /etc/inetd.conf, use the second one provided. Also, if you receive a “no process” error when trying to killall, just ignore that step and instead type:
sudo inetd /etc/inetd.conf

Hope this helps someone.

[...] up a nethack server, and i don’t remember it being as painful as it was this time. i thank this blogger for guidance. it was enough to make me go postal. damn thing kept dying and wouldn’t tell me [...]

@Wolf: Nice! I’m glad to hear you have figured it out. I didn’t think to check whether or not a port is blocked. Good call!

Well after several days of agonizing torture with this problem and soon before i almost gave up entirely i am happy to report i have solved this issue!

So as it would seem that port 23 on my machine was getting a “stealth” option meaning that all packets recieved to this port would be droped and i could not find what was causing this to open that port, so as an alternative i nano /etc/services and changed telnet to port 7777 and now it will connect

so anyone who is having a similar problem i suggest giving this solution a try as it may not be anythign but a simple firewall or some sort of internet security in your router (ie SPI) stopping you from getting those connections.

happy hacking!

well as a follow up i seem to be getting a lot closer and it seems all of my problems are rooting from dgamelaunch, it just wasnt copying files over even the “dgamelaunch” wasnt even in sbin
I have gotten a connection via local host now but as soon as i press play same error all over again, and i still cant get connection outside localhost even with tweaking the hosts.allow file to allow all telnet connection and even all connections ill keep working at this and if i actualy find a solution ill post but im slowly starting to lean towards looking for an alternative to dgamelaunch

yes i can start nethack from the command line and i did see however that cp was ommiting the directories and not copying them so i did a cp -r to fix this however now even with the terminfo the way it should be i am still getting the same error though telnet even as a localhost connect i get this.

Hmm… It sounds like it is crapping out at the moment when it should toss you over to the actual nethack console. Is nethack running properly on that machine? Ie. can you start it from the command line?

Also, did you make sure you copied all the files from /lib/terminfo?

well that was my fault lol, it was connection refused because it was ssh not telnet in putty

However….
nethack@ubuntu:~/dgamelaunch-1.4.7$ telnet nethack.game-server.cc
Trying 64.151.45.133…
Connected to nethack.game-server.cc.
Escape character is ‘^]’.
Connection closed by foreign host.
this is my actual problem as i was getting origonaly did this get figured out

Are you running that from the command line or pasting it into /etc/inetd.conf. Cause I think you need to paste it. Check the README file that came with dgamelaunch – maybe I have a typo in this line.