Backing up the maps and configs isn't a simple task. If you figure that the entire server folder is just about 8GB in size currently, it takes a long time to just copy a file over to a backup. Now, figure every time you make a change to an area, or grass grows, or a mob lays an egg, or you drop an item...it changes the chunk file. It's to the point that if done incorrectly, the backup contains files that are actually 5-10 minutes apart from each other in age. This isn't good for anyone.

Hey everyone, we all talked about staffing and have some announcements that will be made in the next few days. MrsPinkin is gonna be promoted to owner :D

Just some background to the decision; now that the server will be hosted locally, not only will he be a big help to me in-person if something goes wrong, but his house has fiber internet so if my internet blows it'll go in at his house. Additionally, he's got a strong tech background (he works technical support for Apple) and will bring a lot to the back-end functioning of the server.

Everyone congratulate him!

We produce tons of log files that are absolutely unruly. I've attached a sample of the logs, which is only 4 days worth: sample.log How can you make any sense of that? Fortunately, we've developed a system for cleaning those up semi-automatically.

So, a minecraft server is a java .jar program, which is a cross-platform executable. If you wanna be really pure about it, the way to start a minecraft server is the following command:

What that is doing is saying "Run a java program, allocate it 3.4GB of RAM, it's a .jar file which is a library of multiple .java files, here is the archive's name, and run it without the user interface.

How many people here have a website? ::waits for hands:: How many people think they know everything involved in the backend for how it all works? ::waits for hands::

When I started playing minecraft, it was always IP-based servers. What a PAIN. "43.23.23.123:25565" or some garbage, and if the host dies and a transfer needs to happen, how do you find out where the server moved to. It's annoying. The same problem exits for websites though...I own www.surfrock66.com and when you type that into a web browser, a lot of stuff happens behind the scenes. You could do full research on how DNS works, but here's my 10 second version: No website really exists behind a URL like www.whatever.com, it's actually an IP address which is like a phone number for the computer. Website names get associated with IP's through DNS, or Domain Name System. DNS is like a phone book for IP addresses based on the URL. There are TLD's (top level domains) like .com and .net, or international ones like .ca and .co.uk, and each TLD has its own directory scheme.