Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I almost posted one of my backlogged posts, but I managed to pull together something to continue this project one more week. Let’s get started!
I don’t know where to begin on this one. Last week, I left off with reinstall after reinstall, trying to fix some error I kept seeming to get. I gave up after wrecking my bootloader during one last attempt to fix everything, forcing the machine to depend on booting to live media, such as my Puppy Linux CD. I stuck around to determine that Ubuntu wasn’t accidentally nuked alongside Micro Core, so I was at least partially appeased on that front.
Sunday came and I thought I would try one more time. I had done some research on GRUB 2 (GRand Universal Boot Loader). Boot loaders are programs that take charge after the BIOS select a drive to boot to. They are in charge of starting the operating system. GRUB is designed for environments with more than one OS, like the one I seem to have ended up with. It is worth noting that GRUB and GRUB 2 are two different boot loaders that serve the same purpose, they both refer to themselves as GRUB, but some places say you can get in trouble if you use support for one on the other. From what I can tell Arch Linux is one of the few distros that use the first one.
I started up Puppy Linux and suffered while trying to find the terminal. That little distro does not follow many of the conventions I’m used to as is! Bad dog! I researched how to repair GRUB and when I looked in my MineOS drive, I found… what looked like a fully functional boot loader.
Annoyed, I told the BIOS to boot to the old SSD before the HDD with the bricked GRUB install. It worded. I was able to boot to MineOS, but I still got a corrupt terminal pseudo-window interface: the configuration console. Sometime after I seemingly bricked my machine, I had the thought that I might not have really had an error to fix all along. I was hoping everything was just one unknown away, and that was it.
MineOS is fairly minimal on the host machine. It really shines in its Web Interface. You connect to its IP with https at port 8443 and sign in using the account you set up during your first boot. I tried that and got a page that got stuck loading. Different computers didn’t help either. I gave up and resolved to put the finishing touches on a stand-alone post I have written after pinging my contact with a picture of the error message and corrupt-looking screen I was having trouble with.
Hours passed, and I eventually got a celebratory reply of all things. I decided to humor him with one last attempt on connecting to the previously tried IP and port. It worked. I seemingly didn’t do anything differently, but it worked on me. I went over to the other towers I had previously tried it on, and it worked on those. It did not, however, like Android Firefox on my tablet, but the browser built into LastPass was accepted.
About this time, I investigated one of the features of MineOS inherits from its parent distribution, Turnkey Linux: Let’s Encrypt. Let’s Encrypt seems to be a free SSL certificate authority, if I got my terms all correct. If you already know what you’re doing or are following a set of instructions and don’t care about learning, you can reportedly have one within ten minutes. The only issue for me was that the application script gave me a bit of a head scratcher. It wanted a domain, and I didn’t know what to put. In the end, I figured I wouldn’t be exposing the login port to the Internet anyway, so I can wait on setting that up.
The web interface itself is well polished. I still don’t know what all I am looking at, but it is a whole lot easier to behold than a command line. Exploration is also much easier. I set up a test server, trying to get something going on a port other than 25565, the default Minecraft port, but some diagnostics and research later, and it looks like part of the Web Interface’s design principals exclude it from being able to open additional ports, mainly that not all operating systems it can possibly be installed on keep track of open ports the same way. I suppose that keeps the dabblers contained in a field of relative protection, leaving advanced use to more seasoned computer users.
I moved my test server to the default port and had a volunteer try again. It worked, and this time when I expected it to work.
MineOS has an import feature that’s supposed to be fairly smart when it comes to importing archived servers. .ZIP files were confirmed, but I wanted to feed it a tarball and see what would happen.
I took the server of interest offline and –very important– made a copy separate to any backups I may have had. I then started weeding out things that wouldn’t make it over to MineOS, such as the WorldBackups folder, the start script and its backup, and copies of the datapacks we are running. The tarball came out to 1.9GB.
Transportation was a hassle. I didn’t have the patience to set up SSH correctly, so it gave me a warning if I tried to copy. The old host machine, my father’s computer running Linux Mint, didn’t have an SSH server on by default, so I couldn’t grab it from the new server. I tried my 1TB external drive, but when I finally got it mounted, it was read only, likely because of the way it was formatted. Two additional USB sticks were too small, but I could get it onto an external hard disk drive we have around with plenty of room.
Issues persisted. The MineOS terminal did not want to mount my storage device, and when it did, it wasn’t polite about where it put it. I still don’t know where it was hidden, but one search did turn something up I know for a fact was on the external HDD. For a few actions, like mounting/umounting or listing the contents of some directories, I required root access, but sudo doesn’t look to be a thing here. I used the su (substitute user) command to switch to root, something that should never be done lightly. I even tried booting to Ubuntu and manually copying the .tar.gz file over, but I had some kind of error I have no clue how to address.
In a frustrated fit of doubt, I suggested I may just move the hard drive over to my father’s machine and copy it over to the import directory manually. It actually sounded worth a shot, so I did it. It worked.
I booted the server machine and found a file all ready to import. I set it up, and had a volunteer log in to a brand new world– It was supposed to be the preexisting world. I ended up moving the drive back over to my father’s computer only to discover that it had basically unpacked my improperly compressed tarball and stuck a new server at the root.
I was not pleased. I manually moved the different elements over to the new hard drive and saved each piece. Not all parts had counterparts. I kept the MineOS exclusive files intact, while grafting in the original server’s files. The World file was spelled world (lower case w), but the hardest element was the properties file. For that one, I actually had to evaluate it line-by-line.
Finally, after six weeks worth of work, I had the server on its own dedicated server. I started it back up, and had my volunteers examine the world. So far, all systems appear normal. I plan on keeping on its original Minecraft version for at least a day and I want to make a restore point or backup or whatever they call it. I just need to learn the MineOS Web Interface.
I learned a lot in this project. If it weren’t for this blog, I would likely have given up long ago and just hosted it from my own machine. If it weren’t for my time in MicroOS, the last push I made could have easily have taken two or three more weeks. I’m glad it’s over in time for New Year. And now, I present the newest member of my little computer family: ButtonMash!
Final Question: There are a few details left to polish, but I do not plan on covering them. Do you want me to change my mind?