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.

Many of you know, I use linux full-time and fully embrace the "open source" philosophy. The best thing, in my opinion, about that philosophy is that if something changes or if you begin to disagree with how something is going, you can take that and run with it in your own version. I believe that philosophy applies to things like this server; if I were to get hit by a bus or something, everything should be available for someone else to take the publicly shared info and re-create the server with minimal interruptions. It's much like the service model of software, the entire software and map library should be available to anyone...what I (and all the owners that have participated over the years) do that's special is run and host it, make sure it's up, etc.

From the time that I joined the server until now, I think we've done a pretty good job making things available, but I think we can do a lot better. As many of you know, we're getting ready to deploy some donation-funded hardware to get the server in a more stable place. With this move, I'm gonna be cleaning up some pluginconfigs, some of the backend scripts and such, and changing some big-level configuration. I am gonna start a blog series to document some of the things I'm doing. Now that this blog isn't making us any ad money, this is just me dicking around, but my hope is that all the Owner's Corner posts will basically be come a guide for how to run a server from actual hardware, to maintaining the website, etc. All of these skills should be able to be translated to other type of server hosting; for example, some of the BASH scripts we use for backup management could EASILY be used to automatically backup projects on a linux box.

Feel free to submit questions for future topics in the comments, but I probably have about 5 ideas to get started.