I am the proud owner of another “server” now! Perry came over yesterday, and we spent the day setting up a new stand-alone server to migrate Minecraft onto.
Minecraft was starting to run slow and choppy on my big server, so we figured giving it a dedicated machine would improve things. It didn’t like playing with Plex and my Windows 7 VirtualBox on the big server.
We started out with a case and motherboard Perry had procured, but ran into issues pretty quick. First it refused to boot EFI, then it randomly did. Still haven’t figured that one out. Once we got Debian shoehorned in there, we ran into “out of range” errors on the monitor. It was a bit of a shit-show. One computer was almost thrown out a window.
Then we calmed down, and regrouped. I had an old HP desktop I had acquired as a spare a while back, that was just sitting around. We did a comparison on processors, and found it was actually better than the setup we were having issues with!
We did a quick change of plans, crammed the HD and RAM into the HP and voila, working Debian!
We got everything setup and configured, copied Minecraft over to it, and ran some tests. It actually seems to be running noticeably better!! We than ran into a kerfuffle. The Minecraft server itself isn’t very huge size-wise, but the flipping DynMap is ENORMOUS. 74 GB of about 5 million tiny, tiny files.
I tried copying them to an external drive from the old server, but stopped that pretty fast as it was gonna take 11 hours thanks to USB 2.0. Then we tried copying over the network, which was going to take 33 hours into Monday so that was scrapped as well. We eventually settled on zipping the folder on the old server, then copying. We started the zip last night. It finished sometime early this morning. I then copyed the 74 GB zip file over the network in about 30 minutes. That was about an hour ago, and I’m still unzipping at this point – its about 2/3’s done 🙂
Now if this silly archive would just finish expanding, I could get the server back up and actually running.
History of our Minecraft Servers
I got thinking about it last night, and realized this is the 5th iteration of Minecraft server Perry and I have had over the last 7+ years. It all started in 2012 with a server running off Perry’s desktop in his dorm room at UMaine. When he graduated, the files were migrated to my old 2009 iMac when I lived down in Searsport. It ran on that for some time, until we bought a refurbished Dell Optiplex 790 SFF to use as a designated server JUST for Minecraft. That machine was the server for several years, but now its been transformed into my main desktop that I’m typing on right now. It was replaced by Demonreach, our Dell PowerEdge T300 – the big server. The small Dell we were using had become overloaded, as it was running Minecraft AND Plex, and we needed more storage space. The PowerEdge worked great for some time, but the Minecraft server has just grown to ridiculous proportions. I think its going to do much better by itself on this HP Compaq 6300. Plex and all my other crap is going to stay on Demonreach and be quite happy with the processor not being maxed out constantly.
I’m not sure what the name of Perry’s original PC was, but since then the server has been named Anubis, Hereti-Corp, Demonreach, and now – Raftel. Bonus points to anyone who knows where all these names came from!