SE are funding a server for 'community building'

Question

CHAOS are graciously going to fund a server for use by the community for Game On! and LPing purposes. (Please note they really don't have to do this, so don't try pushing for the extra bandwidth/RAM.)

They are only funding this, so we need to decide how we are going to manage this.

First we need to decide what we want the server for. Whether it is going to be a dedicated server for a single game or whether it's going to have greater access and other requirements such as the technical things I don't understand (see: VPN, RAM-disk) once we have these decided we can begin looking for places to host it from.

Answer 1

For those unaware, I'm a Systems Administrator at Stack Exchange. See my serverfault profile for verification.

I've discussed with the management and here's the deal. We've got a limited budget for this project, but within the bounds of that budget I can procure for us a single VPS with the following specs:

• 2 cores
• 2gb ram
• 50gb disk
• a small number of static IPs
• Ubuntu Server

Now, given this machine, I can say for certain we could easily run a single minecraft server very well in an instance this size, as this is the exact size of the server I use to run the blocktown.org minecraft server.

This is my assumption as to how we would run it. I'm going to pay for the vps out of my pocket and expense back to the company. This will make it easier for the community as we won't need to ask anyone whose not an employee to trust that we'll reimburse them. I already know Stack Exchange pays their bills on time and am not afraid to trust them on this :)

Nobody will have root; we will have a very tightly controlled sudo environment for people who need escalated privileges, otherwise the individual servers/projects will run as normal, separate user accounts. We will need to create some method of coordinating in the Game On! community as to what tasks we wish to run on the VPS. Login access for the user accounts will be tightly controlled to minimize any accidental downtimes.

KEEP IN MIND: Minecraft is an extremely bloated program. It's a memory and cpu hog, which means that with it running we won't have juice available for much else. I'm pretty certain we could run a mumble/ventrilo/teamspeak server on it without issue, but having two minecraft instances at the same time would be almost impossible without heavy lag.

I will mostly pay for the vps and be willing to help during my free time, but it's not part of my normal Stack Exchange job to maintain the VPS 24/7. For this task, I will be relying on the community members that have already proven they're capable of maintaining minecraft and other servers.

Please vote on this and we'll see where it lands.

Answer 2

As Peter has laid down the initial groundwork for this, I'd like to offer another alternative.

Ubuntu has a new product called Juju which makes deploying to the cloud super easy. I've written a "Charm" (a service you deploy to the Cloud) for Minecraft to use with Juju. In addition we have a Terraria server charm in the works and one for all Steam servers. While I'm not sure the budget or guidelines it might be another alternative to a single machine. So someone with access to a cloud service, say AWS, could run the following commands to create a Minecraft instance

juju bootstrap
juju deploy minecraft
juju set minecraft motd="Gaming Stack Exchange Minecraft!" allow-nether=true max-players=15
juju expose minecraft

This would spin up an instance, set some parameters (though it comes with "sane" defaults), and expose it to the world for access. When you're done using the server:

juju destroy-service minecraft

This removes the minecraft service from Juju and if you're done with Juju altogether

juju destroy-environment

In the same vein, someone could deploy steam and do a juju set steam game=tf2 and there's a TF2 server running. There's a list of charms in the Charm Store as well as several still awaiting approval for the store.

Depending on how much is being allotted for this venture would really impact how feasible an option like this is. While it's advantage is clear (flexibility in server deployments) it's major draw back is the additional cost and burden of "management" since these servers likely won't be 24/7 servers. As such there would likely need to be a small core of people who have access to create these environments (to avoid abuse and ensure servers don't accidentally get left on). However, using something like the Amazon IAM tools new users can be added with privileges and others removed if need be.

I know Peter has mentioned he has a super tuned setup he uses for Minecraft, we can capture that in the Minecraft charm and make it easy to deploy that super tuned hot-rod Minecraft server whenever it was needed. In addition, if there was a game that the community wanted to run I could help author a charm for that game. Of course this would produce a different price a month for an AWS account but would allow for some flexibility in what and when games are run for the community.

Answer 3

First of all I think it's important to note we already have a server run by MarcoCeppi for our 24/7 things, such as mumble and TF2, so we only need this for the more back end things (such as changing maps/mods in minecraft). Anything that can be run entirely in game is not what we need this server for.

Secondly will we ever need to store files on the server (such as commonly used video bits for our channel, or the mods/free game we are playing) if so we will need some way of uploading/downloading from the server.

Thirdly who will be the maintainer of this server? Once we figure out what access it requires we need someone we trust (and knows what they are doing) to sort things out.

Answer 4

Having a service of some kind where we can give/trade items between various games we play would be handy.

For instance I have a lot of old dungeon defenders and guild wars stuff I don't need anymore

The Steam thread became useless real fast

Answer 5

First of all, awesome that they are willing to do this for us. And with that out of the way, onward.

They are only funding this, so we need to decide how we are going to manage this.

First we need to decide what we want the server for.

I believe the goal of this server is to be used for Game On! events first and foremost (correct me if I am wrong). So we should get a good idea of which games fit this bill where it makes sense for us to have a server. Now I know there is no way to predict every game we will ever want to try out in a Game On! event. But we need to take a stab at getting some sort of a base line down to pick out a server for this.

Another thing we should consider is availability of public servers for games. Forgetting the fact that Marco Ceppi is already providing us a server capable of hosting L4D1/2 servers, Steam's server's are actually up to snuff and I think would suffice well enough. TF2 on the other hand would be a bit harder to get it to ourselves. Then there is Minecraft and Terraria and games of that ilk, where there is nothing provided to us.

[...] we need to decide how we are going to manage this

The management of the server will really come down to what the server runs. At the end of the day if the server is only used for hosting scheduled events like Game On! or a Let's Play then management becomes fairly simple. We would need some sort of way to reserve time on the system for the event and management could fall to someone leading the event itself.

If we utilize the system for a 24/7 minus event times, then there may be a bit more management depending on which game is decided to be the one that is hosted during the non-event usage of the server.

Now I think it worth noting that I am completely on the side of getting a dedicated minecraft server simply because it was the minecraft Ultra Hardcore event that kind of tipped off the forward motion on this topic. It seems to be a fairly popular game among those of us who partake of the community aspects of the site. The problem being with this that minecraft server requirements do not really match most other games, even ones like Terraria. So yeah, we really do need to see what it is we want to host on the server.