Distro for dedicated minecraft, web and teamspeak machine.

Stabhappy

Stabhappy

Stabhappy

Associate
Joined
5 Mar 2007
Posts
173
Hello all!

I'm about to take delivery of my new components which will replace my current VPS solution. I plan to host the services from my home with my Virgin Media 100Mb connection (it's purely a matter of cost).

The hardware I've ordered is:

Athlon II X3 450 3.2Ghz tri-core.
MSI C45-870
8GB of DDR3 ram (very cheap stuff!)

Paired with a 420W PSU, few misc drives (1TB, 2TB, 500GB) and of course a trusty ATI 3450 for low power display :).


But on to the problem: My current VPS is Ubuntu server, sort of cobbled together by myself in a vague attempt to take a crash course at linux. To be fair, it's gone relatively well. I've learned a lot but the specs just arent up to scratch and the rent on that thing was proving to be a big issue due to relying on donations.

Basically, what would anyone with similar experience recommend? Minecraft is run on JavaVM, and our web frontend for that (McMyAdmin) is run on .net or Mono so that has to be taken into consideration.

I've been told CentOS is ideal, but I have zero experience with anything other than Ubuntu.

Would Ubuntu server fare well purely because I am accustomed to it? Also, in the case that I need to provide access to other server admins, and need to therefore run Gnome or whatever else, would it be more fitting to just install Ubuntu Desktop and call it done?

Should I just stop kidding myself and install a barebones Windows 7? :D

Any input would be invaluable. Hardware arrives today.
 
If you know and are comfortable with Ubuntu, then that should be fine as long as all the software runs on it. GUI-wise...tell them to man up and cope with the command line! :p

Seriously, though, you may want to consider something light such as XFCE or LXDE to save on resources. :)
 
I appreciate your reply.

I guessed Ubuntu would be fine and certainly would help stop a bunch of headaches as a result of me having to learn a different distro (even though they aren't that different AFAIK)

I do not trust the other guys with SSH and command line... But maybe a few bash scripts in the home directory of the user would be sufficient, that way they can just SSH in and ./startserver ./stopserver.

Also, atm I'm using screen to keep things running. This was posted as a tip on ubuntu forums - is this common practice or would I be better off looking at some custom init scripts? (sorry if my terminology is off, I'm really not that experienced at this at all).

Most of the problems I can think of with bash scripting is passing arguments to a screen session, which I have attempted previously to run from cgi-bin... bad idea.. nothing but headaches and roadblocks to work around, no doubt compromising security..

Is there a better way to do this that anyone knows of?

I did do a lot of research on it a few weeks back but could find nothing suitable.

I actually think I ended up running Apache as the minecraft user, but scripts still wouldn't work from cgi-bin even with appropriate permissions. No doubt me overlooking something.

Thanks once again for your insight :)
 
At the moment, I do the same thing and just run the Minecraft server as myself from within a tmux session, but I'm looking at moving away from my current host to Linode where I can run my distro of choice (Arch) and setting it up in such a way that I can launch the server as a daemon, rather than having to maintain the tmux session. You could probably do something similar on Ubuntu, but the process for setting that up might be slightly different.

It would be interesting to see how you get on with this, though. :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom