Minecraft Server Administration
Since 2016, I have been administrating various Minecraft Servers, ranging from vanilla survival modes to creative mode to custom modes, like skyblock, and even to minigame systems. Along the way, I have built new processes, migrated servers, created best practices, and coded solutions for my small network of servers.
Currently, I run my entire server network on computers made from older physical hardware and parts. At times, I have run instances inside of partitioned cloud systems, however I found that it was cheaper and more effective to host locally.
All server instances use an extremely light-weight fork of Linux and are securely accessible through SSH, secure shell connection, or RDP, remote desktop protocol. This allows me to connect to the server and quickly run some commands in the terminal with SSH or complete complex operations more swiftly with a GUI with RDP.
Depending on the current needs of the active player-base on the network, multiple Minecraft server instances with vastly different experiences may be running. Without a proxying system, users cannot jump to different another Minecraft server without exiting the server and rejoining while using a different server address to connect to a separate port.
However, by adding a frontend proxy system, users can simply be sent from one server instance to another without manually going through the connection process. Currently, I'm using a fork, called Waterfall, of the open source system Bungeecord to act as the front end proxy that users can connect to.
Waterfall handles all of the authentication between the client, the server system, and the Minecraft login. When a player connects to the server, the proxy establishes a secure connection and ensures that the user is on a valid Minecraft account. It then internally routes the connection to the proper Minecraft server instance that the player is set to join.
Recently, I have also begun to use source control to track configuration files for my various servers. This allows me to effectively backup all server configuration, track changes made over time, easily create forks for new servers, and easily develop a server in a development environment before deploying the new version in production.
Currently, I am using GitLab as version control for this project and am working to have individual server files split across various sections, in order to make it easier to save data.
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