Linux MC Server

gaming club minecraft server (Volunteer)

Starting when I was an officer of Whitworth Gaming Club, due to safety concerns we shifted to an online only environment during the 2020-2021 academic year. With this online focus, we had to provide access to some online games for our community. My biggest role in that front has been introducing Minecraft to the community via the implementation and support for a Minecraft server that members could easily join. Rather than simply paying for a 3rd party hosting service, I took this as an opportunity to setup and run my own server through a locally accessible machine.

The initial approach was setting up an old laptop with Lubuntu and the Mojang provided server java application. This worked well enough for my small group to be able to access 24/7 and play together during meetings. Over time, I added a club subdomain to make access easier with the removal of the need to know IP addresses. I also made sure to be consistently available to help troubleshoot or restart the server when members had difficulty joining. Through this, I've gained outside of the classroom experience in basic server management and Linux usage.

Starting in January of 2021, with some signs of the laptop having more issues than what was desired, transferred the server from the Lubuntu laptop to instead a raspberry pi running raspbarian OS and using the Spigot, then Paper, application to host. Once the pi environment was setup with no GUI, then configured the server to improve optimizations so as to support more players. This provided new learning experiences in diving deeper into a Linux environment (as I opted to have no GUI interface whatsoever) and first time overclocking as I needed to improve the CPU clock speed for better server performance. I continue to make upgrades to this constrained system, such as switching to the usage of a solid state for storage to gain higher read/write speeds compared to the pi's default microSD card.

Although I graduated and no longer serve as an officer in the club, I continue my role as the administrator for the Minecraft server. Both as I continue to be a part of the club's community, and in keeping practice of maintaining a server as I become more knowledge on Linux.