Linux Minecraft; Official Bit-tech server

I'd love to play but that choice of day was just no good for me. Sunday of a massive bank holiday weekend in the UK and the diamond jubilee...everyone was out partying man! Bet I'm not the only one.

Can we give it another go? Pretty please?

 

Anti-Griefing

Hello all

Haven't been by the bit server for a while now; must drop in to see what's happening... I was active on the older servers we used to have, but that was a long time ago now (someone, I think stickeh, was running the server on their own hardware at home...?)... I never did finish the Death Star...

The real reason for me posting however is for a bit of advice: what plugins/mods are used on the bit-tech server? Do you employ any anti-greifing plugins?

Reason for me asking is that I'm thinking about setting up my own Minecraft server(s); initially this would be closed, and restricted to just trusted/known people, but if I could employ effective enough anti-griefing measures I may well decide to open this up further.

I actually already run a minecraft server on the same VPS that runs my web site; although, as you can imagine, this is not an ideal solution - especially when there's only 1GB of RAM shared between minecraft, httpd and mysqld. At the moment my server is whitelisted and only people who know me IRL get added to the whitelist. I did run a server in the past without a whitelist and, I don't know how it was discovered, but it got griefed to hell and back. I shut it down as soon as I discovered the griefing, and soon after that my VPS got DDoS'ed into the ground (which took out not only my VPS, but several physical server nodes at my hosting provider).

I'm now looking into either a dedicated minecraft server host or setting up another VPS, but this time I want to be damn sure that I do some server hardening and I will use more extensive mod/admin tools. I already have a few ideas about bukkit/tekkit plugins that look promising, but I'd be interested to hear from a more experienced MC server admin. Feel free to PM me if this isn't the sort of stuff you want out in public.

 

AFAIK, the ultimate anti-griefing plugin is HawkEye. Run that with a MySQL database backend and say goodbye to all griefing attempts. It can rollback all types of block changes, by user, time or block type (or a combination). I have only used its predecessor, BigBrother, but if it is anywhere near as good it must be awesome!

Another useful plugin is LWC (LightWeight Chest protection). It lets you set locks on any chest/sign/furnace/dispenser/other storage that only allow you access, or access with a password, or certain player access, or public access etc. Basically UNIX permissions but in Minecraft for chests. There is also a hidden feature in there called drop transfer (sadly it has been disabled on the bit-tech server) that lets you designate a chest, then any items you drop get sent to that chest. So you could set up a chest with drop transfer at home, then go to a certain NPC village with double chests full of unwanted sand and transfer everything!

And of course, the actual Permissions plugin. Different groups, world access, everything with permissions. UNIX permissions in Minecraft for everything (except chests, that is LWC)!

 

Did I miss the whole thing? ****, sorry! Bank holiday weekend so I went away

 

HawkEye was actually one of the first plugins that I decided I'd need, so it's good to know that I'm on the right track! Though in many corners, Guardian seems to be getting recommended over HawkEye. Apparently it's by the same devs behind HawkEye and BigBrother, and is supposed to be better...? I'll probably dig into that a little further before I make my mind up; HawkEye gets my vote at the moment though...

I'd planned to use Lockette, which seems to do the same thing. I've come across LWC, so I guess I'll have a look to compare the features of both. Chest protection will definitely be useful either way.

With regards to drop transfers, I think that's actually going to be an upcoming feature in Minecraft. One of the recent Yogscast videos showcased one of the latest development versions, and it featured a chest which seems to have exactly that functionality. I'm pretty sure it's craftable, but I can't remember off the top of my head. Hopefully it'll make it to 1.3

Yes, permissions look like they're going to be a bit of a nightmare...

Cheers for the advice . I'm probably going to also use WorldGuard, so I can lock areas such as spawn, and also NoCheatPlus. I have considered using obfuscators to prevent the use of x-ray texture packs, but I'm not so sure at the moment as they seem pretty CPU intensive...

I also found quite a few interesting little plugins which should make the experience a little more "MMO/RPG-like"; might be a little more interesting than just building gigantic and ridiculous structures with unlimited resources . I'll keep a separate creative world though (likely for trusted users only); people have already been building a shedload on my current server - myself included - and it'd be a shame to lose it all.

 

What server is everyone playing on now?

i tried the ip's i had saved in my pm box and the survival server doesn't seem to exist anymore and the creative server seems to now be called Danny-craft! which unless it was reset doesn't look like Bit-tech creative lol.

 

Just in case anyone is interested, I tested both Guardian and HawkEye last night. Guardian seems to be in it's very early stages at the moment, and still has a few flaws. The biggest of one I found was that I couldn't roll back damage caused by TNT. Which is fairly important. Plus database searches seemed to take far longer than HawkEye, even with restrictive parameters, and this is on a server that's only had one user on it so far.

Although HawkEye hasn't (and doesn't look like it will be) be updated in a while, I found it works just fine with Craftbukkit 1.2.5-R3.0.

 

Hey, lprob answered almost everything but i think i can still give a good tip

I am using HawkEye on the server at the moment but the developer is no database expert (neither am i, but i did find some very useful tweaks). The key is indexes The default indexes are not enough. Our server is moderately busy and i had my database filling up on me because the clean-up thread died on me. I still have to play around but be sure to create an index on your hawkeye data database on date (not sure what the precise name is) this will keep your clean-up fast

i'm still experimenting with other indexes (of course you don't want to make to many) but i am not really sure they have helped. It seems like it, but that's just by feel.

Hope this is useful to you

 

XM, can you fix the village?

 

awwww

I would have loved to have you guys on my server

 

Excellent, this may well prove to be useful advice; I'll take a look into it At the moment there are only 10 possible users, and I've only ever had 5 users on at the same time, but if/when more people start joining it could start to be an issue.

 

XM - thanx for fixin' the village!!
I paid you two cows for taking the time to help instead of going cowhunting
- and they have been breeding in your farm outside the castle..
There should be 4 cows there by now..

 

I think I've come to a decision lately: multiplayer Minecraft is a hell of a lot more fun when someone else is looking after the server!

Setting everything up is a real PITA... ChatManager, HawkEye, iConomy, Jobs, ModifyWorld, Multiverse (Core, Inventories, Portals & NetherPortals), NoCheatPlus, PermissionsEx, Residence (this doesn't look like it'll be much fun!), Vault, WorldEdit, WorldGuard.

I've spent most of my weekend on Minecraft, but only a small percentage of that time was spent actually playing the game!

 

TBH, I think the only way you are really going to prevent client-side cracks (like X-ray texture packs) is through being a good admin. If someone is quite obviously using an X-ray texture pack or some other form of client side cracking, then give them warning to stop (I remember quite a few people on the bit-tech server doing that, along with flying. You know who you are.). Should they not stop, then kick. Should they continue doing it, ban. There is a popular rule - 321 rule (I think). 3 warnings, 2 kicks, then a ban.
And remember to keep regular backups! MineOS+ (my favourite Minecraft server distro) has built in rdiff backups, which only save the changes to the world, rather than the whole world. This means you can have very frequent backups, and store them for a long time!

 

Seems like an awful lot of chances.

Perhaps for different infractions or for infractions of a dubious nature but warning-kick-ban should be enough for anyone.

 

It's almost an on-the-spot ban if you're not a bit-tech member on Survival.

 

I've already got nocheatplus installed which should detect a good few violations; though it's a little twitchy and it's been kicking people for supposedly placing/breaking blocks too quickly, even though I know the people in question are not running hacked clients (in one case, I was with one of them! ). I've had to set the thresholds a little higher to cut down on false positives.

As far as rules go, I've posted my rules up on my blog, even though I haven't got my survival map running yet. I've gone for "three strikes and you're out": first strike is a temporary reduction to the "Noob" group, where players will be unable to build or interact with the world; second strike is a tempban; third strike is a complete ban.

At the moment only friends (or friends of friends) are on the whitelist, so it's not too much of a problem. There's only one admin at the moment - me! - so I'm not sure if/when I'll be opening it up to more people; I don't have the ability to be there all the time, and I don't think any of my other users have that much experience in running/admin'ing a minecraft server. I don't have that much experience either, to be honest! I may open it up to bit-tech members, but I'm not sure yet.

I'm renting a server from a hosting company (get-sourced), so sadly I don't have the ability to run whatever distro I want... They use the Multicraft control panel, which does have the ability to automatically back up the world (currently got a daily backup running), but they only store up to three backups and it only backs up the primary world. I have multiverse installed, and there are already 4 (soon to be 5) world folders...

However, I do have a VPS for my web hosting, so it's probably possible to write a bash script that connects to the Minecraft server over FTP and take a backup of all world folders. I already have cron jobs running to back up http files & SQL databases, so adding another one is not exactly a problem. Though I haven't got a clue how to write such a bash script! Some research is in order...

EDIT: It seems that shell scripting is much easier than I thought... I can just user wget -r on an FTP host and grab all content... Might as well do a daily back up of the whole server, my VPS has more than enough bandwidth...

 

Because I play alot of singleplayer, and I reinstall windows quite alot, I thought i'd put mineOS on my windows2008 server at home.
http://gyazo.com/9c338bf38c416d6d75d9cd63a5440694
It's really good, much better than I expected it to be.
Mainly using it for the cronjobs, so I don't have to worry about my map corrupting/getting blown up/losing it.

It also backs up to my other server which serves as a NAS.

 

You are using the old version of MineOS? MineOS+ is the newer version that is still being worked on - that UI looks absolutely horrible compared with the MineOS+ one! MineOS+ is developed by the community as a fork from the original MineOS, while the developer or MineOS went on to create MineOS CRUX (not based on tinycore but on CRUX) which I have not tried out yet. MineOS+ looks nice, performs well and does what I need it to do, all in an 8GB VM, so I think I will stick with it.

 

It works perfectly, without fuss and it has a small footprint..
If it's not broken, don't fix it.*



*mod it