Cluster Servers and LANs, is there any news?

[Darkblood]

Hi all

Me and some friends have been running a cluster of 4-5 Ark servers for some years now, but due to the cooling down of interest in the game, we just moved our servers from rented services to a computer inside the house of one of the admins. So despite our experience in running servers we ran into another one of Ark's shortcomings: the owner of the machine cannot transfer between servers now, as he is in the same LAN as the machine. (Isn't it wonderful how you can still run into these "WildCardisms" even after years of play).

To be clear, if you are hearing of this for the first time: everyone else can transfer fine and the cluster is working as it should. It is just this one guy (who's paying the electric bill btw) who cannot. That is because clustering does not go well with LANs, this is a known ARK problem (since early 2016 at least), the whole point of this message is to see if people know of new-ish workarounds.

So, the two best threads we found were: 

arkservermanager.freeforums.net/thread/5745/clusters-on-lan

arkservermanager.freeforums.net/thread/7933/unable-transfer-server-clusters-lan

Summin up: it will only work if: (1) you do enable NAT loopback in your router; or (2) use a VPN.

Sadly for us, the guys router doesn't seem to support loopback and the VPN has some quirks to it (mainly it is either paid or kinda slow, and if he tries to turn it on just to do transfers, he tends do desync/disconnect).

There is also some tutorials around about setting up a Windows Loopback adapter, but those are even older and seem geared towards Windows 7. We are getting bad results in windows 10.

So we are wondering if new options have sprung up since those threads were posted, or if this is it. 

[DirkInSA]

To my (limited) understanding the win (anything 10 or 7) loop back stuff will only work for the machine whereon it is enabled: So unless your hosting dude is running the game AND all the maps from his own machine that will not help.
I had the same issue a while ago - ran with a linux gateway that I could make do proper loop back NAT - which then crashed and burned; and I messed around for several weeks trying to get a commercial D-Link router (which had a loop back tick mark that did NOT work) to do the same stuff. The only real answer is a router that can properly do loop / hairpin NAT. Otherwise you are lost! I ended up with a MikroTik router which (painfully) can do the business. There may be other routers out there that can do the stuff auto magically - but I dunno what they may be ....

Never tried a VPN - but that does seem to be a lost cause for an online game. OK for downloads or whatever - but no onlne. PS-Edit to join a server (on the LAN) and then turn on VPN to jump servers CANNOT work. Ever. Either he plays from scratch through the VPN (public IP address) or through LAN (private IP address) - but no way to "switch" this in mid game - the connected server (LAN) will cease to exist as soon as a VPN is connected.

For work around (and it IS painful) the hosting guy clearly has local access to the servers, therefore he can exit the map, copy / move his SteamID.arkprofile between the various saved map locations and then join the new map. That will transfer his base Character (but not inventory and etc.). And he can use the terminals to move his kit. But it is really not ideal!

[Xenithar]

Solution: Buy a modern router. My Ubiquitis don't give me any issues and I purchased a Netgear XR500 for my home, but naturally I removed the horrendous OS that comes on it and stuck DD-WRT (Linux) on it. I am on a LAN with the servers and have never had an issue transferring between our eleven servers. Not once.