minecraft server

My favorite game is Minecraft. Minecraft is a game best played with friends, something not really supported by the game unless youre all on the same LAN connection. This became a huge issue during quarentine, since none of my friends could be safely "local" to me. What's the solution? Making a server of course!

When it comes to servers, the easist option is to just find some free hosting service online and use that. But I've found that these are pretty laggy, and having something that needs to be turned off and on whenever people want to use it seems like it defeats the purpose of having a server to begin with. Now, what's the solution to this connundrrum? Find a computer to sacrifice to make into a server that's permanently running of course!

Once I found an acceptible sacrifice(an old NUC), I put Ubuntu on it because linux is cool. I plugged it into the network and SSHed into it via my PC. Downloaded the minecraft.jar server executable, and ran the commands the minecraft site wanted me to, and guess what? It didn't work.

So apparently you're supposed to "configure the network" and "port forward" and "do actual networking instead of just running one command and expecting it to work." This was confusing. I had kinda just expected it to work, because the site said so. My bad, that's on me. So I logged onto my router so I could resolve the issues there. I had to give the NUC a static IP, then tell the router that any requests made to the port I had the server on would go to the server. Still didn't work. So I was at an impasse, and had to go where no man had gone before - the documentation. So as it turns out, even though I had used Ubuntu, which is supposed to be the easy linux for little babies, the OS still has some sort of weird firewall block that has to be disabled before you can do any sort of port forwarding. BS! Big wi-fi invented firewall commands to sell more fire.

After the firewall was disabled, and the ports were all cleared up, I had a server my friends could connect to! (yay) With all the weird network stuff out of the way, server upkeep was pretty easy. I put together a start script so I could easily boot up the server when needed, and would usually spend like 5-10 minutes a day after that checking in on the backend so that my friends could play comfortably. Overall a sucessful project :D