A couple of my friends and I are tired of having to look for empty servers to mess around (soon you get those "serious" players that cuss you out if you don't play by their 'rules'), so we decided to host our own server. This task has proved near impossible, however.

Apparently the "Create Server" in-game doesn't work, none of my friends can host a server succesfully and neither can I. What I mean is the server starts up fine but no one else can join it, not even by Direct IP. The Dedicated Server option even less so. All of our ports are forwarded fine and none of our firewalls are blocking access.

Also, I've never ever seen non-dedicated servers in the server list... so my question: is it possible to create a server for just a couple of people? Is there any way I can get Hamachi to work on LAN at least?

Would be a pretty bad omission if you can't...

I have often made a non-dedicated server. You mention a firewall. Is it a software firewall or a hardware firewall? The only reason I can think of why your server can not be seen, is that you use a wireless router with a firewall. Other than that I find it hard to determine the problem.

Yes you can run non dedicated servers.
Have you forwarded your ports? (www.portforward.com)
Make sure your software firewall has DM set as full access, not just 1 way.

I have the exact same problem with ALL source engine games. Can someone please explain how to fix this?

Here's the deal. Steam does not like routers. However, there IS a workaround to this. That workaround is called "heartbeat". What heartbeat does is force a connection through to the main servers, which allows others to connect to you. The need for the force is caused by the lack of connection to the main servers at the startup of the server (the list-server, you run it after it gets listed).

Here's what you do:
-Start your server
-Open your console
-Type "sv_lan 0" to turn lan mode off (even if you start in online mode, this needs to be done)
-Type Heartbeat in the console
-Have at LEAST one friend do a "connect <yourip>:<port>" so that it will end up on the list.
From there on, it should work. However, I HIGHLY reccomend SPAMMING the heartbeat function.

This should work for all source games, as it works for me every single time.

i have a dedicated server going to run it 24 hour a day and it works fine the only thing i want to know is some commands to run your server AND ! to change how many people fight against each other with colosseum mode becouse if you don't change it is 1vs1 and i don't now how to change it !?A