MineOS+ and other server discussion

[thevictor390]

Some of you may remember my alternate bitching about / praising of MineOS, which I gave a shot to turn some old hardware into a Minecraft server. However I found it esoteric, complex, and in the end, actually broken.

Fast-forward to the present, and this weekend I discovered MineOS+, since as it turns out the original project was abandoned. Installed this and was up and running within the hour. So here is the current situation:

Some old HP Office PC
Pentium 4 2.8 Ghz
2 GB DDR RAM
160 GB SATA HDD (pulled from an old iMac)

MineOS+ (or rather TinyCoreLinux on which its based) has an interesting model where it, along with the Minecraft server itself, run entirely in RAM using a RAMdisk. This gives excellent performance but presents the problem of volatile data, a problem that I was not able to solve with the original version as crontabs simply would not work. Now, I have regular backups to the HDD. Basically it's the most you can get out of the hardware. SCP, SSH, and a web interface are built-in, along with absolutely nothing else, not even a GUI. Troubleshooting this thing is a bit of a chore for me with little Linux experience but I've learned a whole lot.

So, in the end, I can actually recommend MineOS+ and I'd say absolutely stay away if you want to try the original version for some reason. Anyone else manage a server? (apart from the obvious). How do you go about it?

 

[Matt2000]

Interesting. I was thinking about setting up a Minecraft server for me and a mate to play on, and since I have an almost limitless supply of machines matching that spec I may give it a go. I'm going to need some shelves for all the machines I'll have at this rate...

 

[PacketCollision]

If anyone does get a server up and running (or is just curious) and wants me to detail how things like our auto-updating map work, let me know. If I'm really in the mood to procrastinate, I might do a full writeup.

Just for the record, FG's Minecraft Server is run by yours truly on a 2.33Ghz C2D with 8GB ram. We're running Bukkit, with the latest Sun JDK, and the world is stored on a ramdisk. Backups happen every few minutes, and sync back to a Crucial Sandforce SSD. The mapping software we use is pigmap, and it is served by apache with some js/php hacks I did to make it all work properly.

 

[thevictor390]

If anyone does get a server up and running (or is just curious) and wants me to detail how things like our auto-updating map work, let me know. If I'm really in the mood to procrastinate, I might do a full writeup.

Just for the record, FG's Minecraft Server is run by yours truly on a 2.33Ghz C2D with 8GB ram. We're running Bukkit, with the latest Sun JDK, and the world is stored on a ramdisk. Backups happen every few minutes, and sync back to a Crucial Sandforce SSD. The mapping software we use is pigmap, and it is served by apache with some js/php hacks I did to make it all work properly.

You were the "obvious" in my original post

But I'd love to see a writeup of how it all works. I really know very little about servers so I was lucky to find something that did... well.... some of the work for me. Probably most of it, actually.