[2.0.72] Error "Could not establish network communication with server" when hosting a Factorio server

[julle0]

Hello Factorio Forums,
I am trying to host a server to play on with my friend on my Debian 13 machine, however there are a few issues:

I followed the guide provided by https://wiki.factorio.com/Multiplayer#D ... ess_server and it worked fine for local joining, but trying to join through the public IP of the server doesn't work and gives the error message "Could not establish network communication with server" for the person trying to join. When looking at the server log, nothing appears as someone is joining through the public IP. The server-settings.json file also seems to fail to be read as when hosting the server log says that I'm hosting on a different port than the one specified by my server-settings.json (I played around with changing the port from the default one to try to fix the issue).

Below is the log file from me starting the server, joining locally, my friend trying to join (nothing appears) and me closing the server.