Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am actually doing a one-and-done project. Granted it’s more of a follow up to a huge project I did last year, but still, it felt great getting something short in. Let’s get started!
My family and a few online friends have enjoyed ButtonMash, a Minecraft server I assembled from hardware I had laying around, for several months now, and it recently ran out of hard drive space. Turns out 60 Gb of space doesn’t last all that long when you’re making full weekly backups of the whole server! I started covering this upgrade when I accidentally formatted my Windows drive on my laptop.
I started with a new download of MineOS. I formatted the correct drive and used the dd command to write the image file to the correct drive. With a new install media, I brought it and the new 1 Tb SSD to my tower and hooked them up to be the only things connected. Installation went smoothly until MineOS didn’t recognize the USB WiFi adapter I have.
I put the project down for a while while until I had a chance to continue working on it using an Ethernet connection. The only SATA port my laptop has is hidden below about twenty to thirty screws, the ButtonMash server wasn’t going down for any longer than I could help. Aside from two computers I highly doubted I could use, I was left with the one I put together for my father. With his permission, I installed the drive and ran the security updates recommended earlier during setup.
The only real snag I hit was when I ran into the DHCP configuration requiring manual intervention each time the machine booted. Annoying, as I was working with it mostly from SSH. I knew I had had this issue before, but I couldn’t remember how I solved it. I was a little frustrated with the lack of information online on this topic, but it was amusing for a previous blog post to show up in my search results — twice. My father ended up manually configuring a static IP one boot. It took another hour or two before I remembered static IP was the way to go. I added “fixing the static IP” as something to do announcing project completion.
Copying over the server files was fun. I got into the old server’s web interface and made a fresh archive. Then, using the new install of MineOS, I SSH’ed into the old one to copy the archive over to an import folder using scp. I goofed on the long file path, so I ended up copying it to the home directory and then over to the new hard drive.
With that, I moved over to the new server’s web interface and imported the server. Everything was there, except any backups. I logged into Minecraft and got in no problem, and when I checked, the automatic updates were still around. I’m thinking about redoing those as monthly, but it works for now, nobody touch it!
As a side note, I did some digging into using Let’s Encrypt with MineOS. A thread on the MineOS forums filled in some gaps in my understanding of MineOS’s https security heigine. Https relies on a security certificate –usually issued by a trusted third party– to scramble their communication. When the server self-signs a certificate, you as a client have to trust a potential unknown with keeping their half of the code safe. Before, I was under the impression there wasn’t any sort of security certificate without Let’s Encrypt. However, since the only people who need encrypted access are admins looking to access the web interface, they should probably be in a position to trust a self-signed certificate. From an outside attacker’s point of view, it looks the same as one from a more official source.
I shut both computers down and moved the hard drives around. My father’s computer was reassembled, and ButtonMash’s small MineOS SSD and Ubuntu hard disk were pulled and replaced with the new SSD. I booted it up, logged in with SSH (Public/private key authentication is so nice!), and fixed the static IP from when it had adopted my father’s computer’s IP as static. One more reboot later, and the server was officially up. Within half an hour, one of our players from the outside was on.
One more side note: it looks like by default, you have to first ssh in as a standard user, mc by default, and then use the su (substitute user) command to switch to the root account, as sudo does not come with MineOS by default.
On a finishing thought, I honestly hope someone finds this useful, even if I end up rambling. I purposefully added some key words I wish I had covered last time, so maybe I’ll come across this one next time I find myself setting up MineOS.
Final Question: Have you ever searched for help, only to be redirected back to yourself?