[chinagreenelvis]

I've had a couple of dedicated servers running from my lan and into the outside over the years now, and every time I try to set one up, it takes forever to work out. With L4D 1, I had to use mm_dedicated_force_servers and DMZ hosting in order to be able to connect to it through a lobby with friends. Then, when I originally set up a L4D2 server, all I had to do was set it up through a steamgroup. No DMZ, no special cvars - I could connect through a lobby or just directly without any problems.

Now, a year later, I'm having all sorts of issues and nothing works except running it as a steamgroup server and connecting to it directly. Lobby connections fail, but I can play on it using both the internal IP and the external IP. (I'm currently running a CSGO server with zero problems after using -IP 0.0.0.0 in the startup parameters for that, which makes no sense to me at all.)

The server console shows the local IP and connects to the Steam servers successfully. When I try to manually specify the external IP using -IP or +IP, I get no such connection.

[chinagreenelvis]

I've found that if I use mm_dedicated_force_servers or sv_search_key (as well as unchecking the "auto-find LAN games" option in the client), it works - but only if I remove the steamgroup cvars.

sv_search_key is better since I have a dynamic external IP, but I have no idea why the steamgroup settings produce no effect. The server doesn't even show up in the list.