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My son wants me to help him set up a Minecraft server. Before I dive in, does anyone have any tips? I know I want to set up a bukkit server and am going to follow these sets of instructions:
bukkit wiki
Helpful thread on Minecraft forum

Thanks - thought it couldn't hurt to ask here.

Someone must have some thoughts. Please don't make me have to start posting on Minecraft forums.

I can't even play Minecraft because I get motion sick. The things we do for our children.

<sigh>

<sob>

I'll ask my nearly 12 y/o. Don't ask me though as I have no idea.

Ok he's given me a long answer and then said that you would have to do another technical thing that he couldn't explain so, as you were. :-/

Have you got the server up and running and need tips for managing it, or is it the setting up that you're struggling with?

We have our own Craftbukkit server (running on our Debian Linux server - I assume you'd be using a Windows machine?) If you have specific questions, give me a shout and I may be able to help (depending on how platform-specific your problem is!)

Lazydog, thank you thank you. I haven't set it up yet. Currently, I'd love to know:
1 - if it eats bandwidth
2 - how much RAM I realistically need for 4 players (does it go linearly as number of players?)
3 - is it fairly secure? I'm going to use a whitelist - is that enough to keep random nutters off? That and not making the address public.

I'm setting it up on Mac OS 10.7.something.

Brambleschooks, ha! My son's friend is offering advice too.

Ah, not sure how much help I can be...

(1) - No idea as ours is kept internal to our house and the kids' friends bring their laptops round to connect. This is due to our crappy rural satellite internet system. First of all we have a measly 525MB daily download allowance, secondly, even if we didn't, the satellite modem doesn't support port forwarding and they block practically all ports and thirdly, the satellite system is so laggy that when my kids play on external servers, there's a horrible couple of seconds delay between them doing something and it being reflected in what they see on-screen.

(2) Our Linux server only has 1GB RAM and it's never been an issue with 4 players (the most we've ever had connected at once).

(3) See answer to q.1 but yes - what you've said should be adequate - and also make sure your DS doesn't go around op'ing too many people...only close friends that he can trust to be sensible.

Also, from experience, do regular (nightly?) backups of their world to ward off the tears when someone thinks it'll be amusing to place TNT beside a home that's taken another player days to build

I grave no advice but am jut so pleased in not the only one who has no idea about the world of minecraft!!! my ds1 is 13 and has a bug obsession with it. I know he would take us over our download limit on sky so had to up our Internet package to the next level.

I have I meant, sorry posting from my phone

Sorry no idea BUT word of warning please please be careful downloading cheats as DS has totally wrecked his laptop (DH IT specialist and his team couldnt recover it) and DS 3 friends have done same. Nightmare.

Catz1 - what do you mean? Did they download an infection?

Yep. We all have anti virus software but it got into home hub and crashed laptop and have never been able to recover.

If you set up a server you are opening your home hub so take care on who connects to it. Hope makes sense!

Oh thank you!

Are there sites which are always safe for downloading things?

Thanks for all the advice and especially for the things I hadn't thought about - viruses and backups!

Lazydog, wow, that's not a lot of internet! (I feel like I should speak quietly to avoid using up too much bandwidth. Although I know it doesn't work like that. And I've just outed myself as muttering under by breath as I type..)

I have just made myself paranoid that I've used bandwidth incorrectly. I have. Oh well.

Yup - 525MB a day and if we exceed that we're "punished" by being throttled down to dial up speeds (seriously!) for 24hrs after we exceed the threshold. It's archaic! Add to that the fact that we run an IT business here and that is the business package (at $119/month - internet alone...no bundled tv or phone, so with tax = about 85 quid a month!).

The residential package is only half that allowance!

But I guess that's the price you pay for living in the most beautiful place on the planet not at all biased and for being able to buy 8 acres and a hand crafted log home for the same price as our previous 3 bed semi in the UK

Nope tharsheblows - nowhere is "always safe", sadly, but I repair people's virus infected PC's for a living so we have to be very well protected here, with lots of layers of security. We've been very lucky so far - not a single one of the mods we've downloaded have been malicious. Some just don't work, but that's usually due to the mod having being written for a previous minecraft version or the author claiming to have created a version for "Linux servers" that probably has only ever been tested on one Linux distro.

First half of your post: feeling very sorry for you, how awful!
Second half: you're so lucky, I'm jealous!


Where do you live? I have you somewhere with snow and woods and things that howl in the night.

Yup - in the back of beyond in the Canadian Rockies (amongst the bears, cougars, wolves, moose, etc!)

My husband and son are at Lake Louise now! We all love it there. The other son and I are at home (he has halfterm next week and is not such a skier).

Anyway, I was supposed to do this last weekend but didn't. I'm going to install ClamXav first, just to be safe. Not that there is much out there that targets Macs but might as well do what I can.

I also know two people who have totally wrecked their laptops by downloading Minecraft stuff. Unrepairable at PC World, overrun with some major virus. PC World Tech guy said they're seeing a lot of it and its always after someone has done something Minecraft related.

"Unrepairable at PC World"

Shocker!

Well yes, quite. That did cross my mind.

Do you ever have to do anything to a Mac?

I'm a web developer by trade so this is outside what I do but not by a massive amount. I have some experience removing viruses from PCs, too. I have a 14 yo son so please DON'T ASK.

Do you mean have I had to remove infections from Macs? Literally only once and that was the "Mac Protector" fake antivirus. It was pretty trivial to remove compared to the nasty PC infections I deal with on a daily basis, which is just as well because Macs are really not my area of expertise...

If you mean do I ever get macs in for OS corruption or hardware failure - yes, frequently!

Ooops - forgot to respond to your Lake Louise comment! We're at the other end of the Icefields parkway, plus about another 100km west. The nearest town to us is Jasper, AB, but we're in BC.

Ah yes, Macs aren't the most robust things, are they? I had a hard drive failure once which wiped all the data. Tried to retrieve it from a specialist company but couldn't get anything - I think a woman trained in crisis counseling called me to tell me! Was 9 days out of a backup and not working much at that time, so it was ok.

If you have any tips on how to avoid OS corruption, I'd love to hear. My system is twitchy sometimes. iTunes was freezing everything for a while.

I'll bet it's beautiful there. I'd love to take my sons for a more extended holiday there in the summer and just mosey around -- I still remember visiting Lake Louise in the summer when I was little.

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