{"id":476,"date":"2013-03-27T22:59:38","date_gmt":"2013-03-27T22:59:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/z303.org\/?p=476"},"modified":"2025-03-17T22:03:14","modified_gmt":"2025-03-17T22:03:14","slug":"running-a-minecraft-server","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.z303.org\/?p=476","title":{"rendered":"Running a Minecraft Server"},"content":{"rendered":"

I used to run a small Minecraft<\/a> server with some friends, these are my notes on how I setup the machine.
\n
\nSo for server specification required I looked on the forums<\/a> (but the wiki has a better page now<\/a>). For the machine I went with BuyVM<\/a> after finding them on low end box<\/a>. For the OS, I used Ubuntu 10.04 32 bit server. Mostly because I’ve been using Ubuntu for years. First adding some extra repos.<\/p>\n

sudo nano \/etc\/apt\/sources.list
\ndeb http:\/\/uk.archive.ubuntu.com\/ubuntu\/ lucid main restricted universe multiverse
\ndeb http:\/\/uk.archive.ubuntu.com\/ubuntu\/ lucid-security main restricted universe multiverse
\ndeb http:\/\/uk.archive.ubuntu.com\/ubuntu\/ lucid-updates main restricted universe multiverse
\ndeb http:\/\/archive.canonical.com\/ubuntu lucid partner<\/code><\/p>\n

Then install Java<\/p>\n

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-bin sun-java6-fonts<\/code><\/p>\n

Added an account<\/a> for the minecraft server to run as, to keep things nice and separate. Then followed mostly following some good instructions<\/a> from the forums. First logging into the server with the minecraft account, then sftp’d the latest server jar over and ran it with <\/p>\n

java -Xmx1024M -Xms1024M -jar minecraft_server.jar nogui <\/code><\/p>\n

which is fine for testing but means you need to be logged into a terminal all the time. Running using screen<\/a> is much more useful.<\/p>\n

screen -dmS minecraft java -Xms768M -Xmx768M -jar minecraft_server.jar nogui<\/code><\/p>\n

xms is the size of the memory the server starts with. xmx is the size of the memory the server can expand upon. I took the directory structure from another forum post<\/a>. One other thing to watch out for is IP6 vs. IP4<\/p>\n

screen -dS $SCREEN_NAME java -Xmx${MEMORY}M -Xms${MEMORY}M -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true -jar $SERVER_PATH\/minecraft_server.jar nogui<\/code><\/p>\n

screen is great but no use if the server crashes when you are away from an ssh client, so I used a auto backup script<\/a> called from cron. With another copy used to restart the Minecraft server if it was not already running.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I used to run a small Minecraft server with some friends, these are my notes on how I setup the machine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_block_theme_hide_title":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,10,12,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games","category-linux","category-minecraft","category-technology","without-featured-image"],"featured_image_src":null,"featured_image_src_square":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Zoe","author_link":"https:\/\/www.z303.org\/?author=1"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.z303.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.z303.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.z303.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.z303.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.z303.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=476"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.z303.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.z303.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.z303.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.z303.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}