iRacing installs a local server, running as a Windows service, that commands the game execution. The server is interacted with by regular localhost http calls, e.g.
http://127.0.0.1:32034/gotesting?local=yes&launch=yes&customerid=YourCustomerId
appended with other parameters that for example identify the track and validate the session call, with all calls done by the official members’ site at http://members.iracing.com/
Unfortunately, in these days of permanent cyber security red alert, the hardware and/or software that users have, can cause the game to NOT launch at all, for multiple reasons, the most basic being a firewall blocking the request.
I was a victim of the “game won’t start” problem, but because of a less trivial issue, related to my network configuration. Basically, when more than one Internet access is available, the user must make sure that:
- iRacing traffic is always routed by the same access;
- if there is a chain of devices between the Internet access device and the [router] device directly connecting to the PC clients, the proper port forwarding rule must be set in place.
In my case,
(1) since the first device that the iRacing servers connect to is NOT the router that indeed connects to the iRacing PC clients, that first device had to configured to do a port forward to the second device.
I found that iRacing local server is always listening on port 32034, so my forward rule, set on the device with direct connection to the desired Internet access, is doing a “single port forward rule” for UDP traffic from port 32034 to the IP address of the second device, e.g.
single port forward all UDP traffic from/to port 32034 to the device at IP <the local network IP address of the device that connects directly to the iRacing PC clients>
And that did it for me.
(2) At a point, I was forcing the clients’ end router – which supports multiple WANs – to route all traffic to iRacing servers to the desired WAN, of more than one available:
the iRacing North America servers are in the range
69.25.205.241 .. 69.25.205.249
But this never worked properly and was more complicated than (1), which is a solution, alone.