CS vs. CS:S engine for Dedicated servers.
Don't waste your time thinking if you start the program up then it'll just work. The only reason it won't work is because your running this thing on your computer. If you really really really want a server then just go on youtube and type in "How to use portforward.com" then learn from there.
Im familiar with port forwarding. Ive done java programming to create a chat server with a friend, then made a sort of homemade IRC chat. Simply wrote text to a socket then relayed it to the client.