I just found another post which detailed a way to send the heartbeat from the gateway computer using a perlscript, which might well solve the problem. Unfortunately, my gateway machine is running win2k server Does anyone know how i might be able to convert this script to run on win2k server, or a way to execute perl scripts from a windows platform? It seems that my problem stems from the gateway machine changing the heartbeat port from 27960 to 6000+ so that when the master browser replies, it replies to the 6000+ port instead of 27960 and the connection gets dropped due to my gateway failing to respond on that port Looks like a pretty severe flaw in how the whole hearbeat system works in my opinion...

I just wanted to say that my problem is fixed now So for anyone having the same trouble here is the solution:

Don Pedro is right, ActivePerl will allow perl scripts to be run on windows computers and allows the following bit of code to run (copy this and paste into notepad or something and save with the extension .pl - make sure you've got your folder options to show file extensions though or else you'll end up with heartbeat.pl.txt file which won't work)

use IO::Socket;

while (1) {
$sock=new IO::Socket::INET (PeerAddr=>'master3.idsoftware.com',
PeerPort=>27950, Proto=>'udp', LocalPort=>27960) or die ("Reason: $!\n");
print $sock "\xFF\xFF\xFF\xFFheartbeat QuakeArena-1\x0A";
close ($sock);
sleep(300);
}

Then just run this on your Gateway computer using ActivePerl and it will send the heartbeat to master3.idsoftware.com once every 300 seconds

I take no credit for this script, i found it in another post somewhere but had to make a slight change before it would run ( you can't use // as a comment in perl and whoever posted it had done so)

Anyway, for all of those people using ICS/NAT in between their quake server and the world, this should do the trick