Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I’m setting up another Minecraft server, but this time, I’m setting goals a bit higher than usual. Let’s get started!
I am after an automated, headless, dedicated Minecraft server. That means I want a machine that only runs Minecraft, and nothing else. The machine itself will live in a network closet or somewhere where it can have a power cord and Ethernet while I use SSH to get in to change things. I don’t want to have to babysit it, so I want to write a script or two to manage the whole server. The whole idea is to get the maximum amount of performance for Minecraft while spending as little as possible on the OS and other supporting software.
The main bottleneck is RAM. I have 8 GB to work with for now, and that’s fine for running a survival world and a creative world at the same time in Ubuntu, plus a couple tabs in a browser. Both this machine and Derpy have historically been used to host Minecraft servers, but I want to consolidate any running servers into a single machine. To that end, I’d like to see if I can comfortably run three or four servers at once.
Distribution choice is a little more important now. I’m after something as light weight as possible. Unlike the past several months, I’m actually doing progress reports as I go, so I don’t actually know what I’ll have when I’m done. I’m seriously looking at about six distros ranging from Ubuntu Server to Lubuntu to Puppy Linux.
A family Minecraft friend who will likely be playing on the server brought up Linux From Scratch. It’s a resource for compiling your very own distro. It looks fun; it looks educational. I looked up a couple video reviews of it and decided it looks one or two years down the line for me. My goal is two weeks here, and hardware challenges are starting to make me think I may already need to double that.
It turns out there are a bunch of tools for people who want a little more involvement with what’s in their operating system without wanting to go into source code level of detail. All the ones I looked at either have their domains up for grabs or are otherwise obsolete.
There was one more distro this friend brought up: Tiny Core Linux. It aims to provide you with only what you need to get started with a wide variety of projects. To paraphrase their stated goal: add what you need, not demolish what you didn’t ask for. After poking around a bit more, I found another version on their site that nixes the GUI. It’s not like I even wanted one for this project anyway. Micro Core it is until further notice.
I remembered how Derpy used to have this SSD it supposedly used to improve make things go faster. It’s not like it was being used, so I thought maybe I could use it as part of my little project. So I opened Derpy up and pulled it out.
Different computers with open architecture have different schemes of making sure everything stays where it’s supposed to. When I installed Derpy’s present SSD, I didn’t have the correct part to mount it on, so I just put it on what I had and let it be. With the HDD to SSD bracket being freed up, I went ahead and swapped things around. It just took a while to figure out how to get the bracket off.
With the brackets finally swapped, I moved Derpy’s old 60 GB drive to my project computer case and connected it with a SATA cable I had laying around. I think it may even be the one it originally came with. Power was similarly available within the case, but I had to remount the SSD to another position within its bracket so it could reach.
Trying to mount Derpy’s SSD with Puppy Linux
Backing up a little, before I started seriously considering Micro Core, I burned a Puppy Linux live CD. Puppy Linux is another one of those small distros that comfortably loads into RAM.
It’s funny how the sound of a CD drive made me smile. It used to be the sound occupying the boring period between when I started computer time, and when I started actually playing.
I rejected Puppy Linux after I saw office software as well as other stuff I didn’t need included, like a whole GUI environment. Nevertheless, I still used it to verify that I had everything hooked up correctly. It took a while, but I happened across a utility within Puppy that left no doubt. I spent a while trying to see if there’s anything on the drive before I eventually asked my father and he went ahead and told me to just format it.
I know I said I was going to do a more update-style post, but this is running into a longer entry, so I want to split this one. It provides a natural-ish breaking point about here. While I thought I was going to need about two weeks, as of this writing, I’m thinking either three or four weeks total work may be in order. If I break things up like this, I may end up with even more parts. That, or I just spend some of those weeks not doing much but learning what to do next.
Final Question: Have you ever messed around with otherwise junk to turn it into treasure?