Spent about 12 hours my first day of Winter Break making, customizing, and playing on my Minecraft Server. About the first 3 hours were spent just trying to make it open on my network. Turns out that after the first 20 minutes it actually was ready but a few things led me to believe it wasn't. After setting up my static IP address I thought that I could connect, turns out I was able to but couldn't figure out why I wasn't. I was using my IP: 192.168.1.125 in this case but what I failed to do was put in the port forwarding at the end ":25565". I figured this was only needed for people outside the local network. This is "false". Also you can connect to your own server when you're on the machine hosting it by typing :25565 or localhost.
Here's a few quick little facts in hope that you might save some time if you plan on making a server yourself.
