Setting Up A Minecraft Server

#1 and #2 sons are both addicted to Minecraft. In our "Dad and son techie evening" this week #1 son said that he wanted to set up a Minecraft server. It was actually very easy.

1. Follow the instructions from the Minecraft Wiki to get the Java files on to the server
2. I had to reduce the memory footprint as I'm installing it on the Rimuhosting VPS server that is quite restricted on RAM. I went for starting with 500 megs and maximum of 800 megs
3. Set up a white list file with the users we want to allow
4. Kick off the server: java -Xms500M -Xmx800M -jar minecraft_server.jar nogui

For now I just kept the server running in a screen session on the server. I do have a shopping list of things to tidy up:

• Set it up properly to start at boot time following the Debian init.d approach
• Set up logrotate to manage the log file
• I really must set up iptables or equivalent to give me a suitable firewall