Before doing anything, you need to allow FriendNet through your firewall. The default FriendNet server port is 20038, and we will be using it for the rest of this guide. If you used something else, replace 20038 with whatever you are using.

Open Port with UFW (Debian, Ubuntu)

sudo ufw allow 20038/udp comment 'FriendNet'

Open Port with IPTables

sudo iptables -A INPUT -p udp -m udp --dport 20038 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -A OUTPUT -p udp -m udp --sport 20038 -j ACCEPT

Before downloading and starting the server, we'll want to increase the system's UDP buffer sizes:

# Add sysctl entries.
sudo tee /etc/sysctl.d/99-quic-udp-buffer-increase.conf >/dev/null <<'EOF'
net.core.rmem_max=7500000
net.core.wmem_max=7500000
EOF

# Apply the sysctl entries.
sudo sysctl --system

This helps improve performance for the protocol, as it uses the UDP-based QUIC for its transport. More information can be found here.

Now that we have allowed the server's port through our firewall, we can download the server.

First, go to the FriendNet releases page on GitHub and download the binary for your architecture. You most likely want friendnet-server-linux_amd64.tar.gz.

Extract the files in the archive:

tar -xf friendnet-server-linux_*

You should now have two files:

server
rpcclient

To create the server's config file, run it:

./server

And then close it by pressing Ctrl+C.

Before modifying settings, you can optionally add a systemd service file.

Replace /path/to/friendnet with the path to the directory where the server and RPC client are located.

[Unit]
Description=FriendNet Server
After=network.target

[Service]
ExecStart=/path/to/friendnet/server
Restart=unless-stopped
RestartSec=30
User=friendnet
Group=friendnet
WorkingDirectory=/path/to/friendnet

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Next: Configuration