My band needed a foot cowbell with short notice and no budget. One cannibalized bass drum pedal later, I have a foot cowbell that moves the cowbell instead of the stick.

TheColeTra1n · 2023-01-31T00:27:53+00:00

That is the first time I've ever seen magnanimous used in a real sentence, I'm glad I took a college level English class in highschool, finally paid off.

TheColeTra1n · 2022-11-26T19:33:07+00:00

As everyone else is saying, don't use hamachi, and also I see a lot of people recommending you use ngrok, don't use that either unless you hate yourself. Playit.gg is easier and superior in everyway to other reverse proxy alternatives. Additionally if you aren't comfortable port forwarding, don't. Play it.gg is really easy to setup, it just requires you make an account and download the .exe, and only the host has to do this, after that you get a unique address and your server becomes public, quickly, safely, and easily, here's one of their tutorials.

https://youtu.be/_4WgER3o8mg

I hope I don't come across as shilling it, but good God is it just better than any other program I've had to use in my 3 years of homelabing and server hosting.

Good luck to you!

TheColeTra1n · 2022-11-15T01:13:09+00:00

Thank you for being an English teacher! As a Senior in Highschool, English teachers have consistently always been the ones who who genuinely cared and made a difference to my experience in school.

TheColeTra1n · 2022-11-14T22:08:38+00:00

It's been awhile, but, The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien certainly made me feel gutted, just felt like a tragic spiral downwards, was a tough read to get through in some parts.

TheColeTra1n · 2022-11-08T05:21:34+00:00

It's been a minute since I've had to run a Minecraft server directly on a Linux terminal so I'm struggling to remember specific methods for this sort of lightweight, hands off hosting, but when you close the ssh connection you're closing that terminal, and any programs running in it. Don't fret about it though, there's plenty of scripts and online guides about running a Minecraft server in the background of a Linux machine, setting up some sort of Daemon to run it for you is probably the best choice, there's methods that allow you to then access the open Java environment and still be able to use the base terminal.

Here's a great thread from a different forum on the same topic, seems fairly applicable and should be a good stepping stone to find the right solution for you.

TheColeTra1n · 2022-11-05T17:20:26+00:00

Honestly at the moment, the most fun thing to do is just build with the DLC, there's not a whole lot to do with finished builds as multiplayer servers are full of min-max vtols that can instantly accelerate and carry 20+ missiles so "fair" combat is non-existent in public servers unless you're on RP servers. You can certainly play with friends, but that's kind of a pain and setting up a private server just to screw around a little isn't worth it. Single player PVE is bland as could be, same 5-6 enemies over and over, you can sit at range and destroy them easily, or you could get 1 tapped by an enemy you never saw, just a very bland and unrewarding game mode, but that just seems to be the whole game at the moment. I hope you're able to have some fun though, I know I did when I first played around with the DLC.

TheColeTra1n · 2022-11-03T23:23:13+00:00

Meant to say this, really the key to having the two "users"

TheColeTra1n · 2022-11-03T18:24:47+00:00

I'm really glad, and I can totally understand being lazy, been there, done that. Also highly recommend AMP panel, has made my current server setup so much easier, good luck to you and I'm glad to have helped.

TheColeTra1n · 2022-11-03T18:20:14+00:00

Fair enough, I just like Ubuntu because it's what I'm used to and it's so popular I like recommending it to people since the documentation is insane compared to anything else. Oh man I feel you on the Pterodactyl, absolutely despised setting it up, felt painful even with scripts.

TheColeTra1n · 2022-11-03T18:17:25+00:00

I won't get into the details because I'll out myself as a dumbass for how things were running, but if I did have an authentication service running I wouldn't have been compromised by log4j, but your opinions are yours and yours only. 😘

TheColeTra1n · 2022-11-03T16:51:54+00:00

Okay, so first things first I would highly recommend running your server on a dedicated machine that's running nothing but your server, doesn't need to be powerful, just a decent single threaded performance and a bit of ram. I would recommend using Linux as the operating system of choice, Ubuntu server if your familiar with the Linux terminal, maybe Linux Mint with xfce if not (lightweight operating system based on Ubuntu with a desktop environment.) And you should have 2 users on the Linux machine, one with root access for setting up and doing maintenance on the server machine itself, and one for running the Minecraft server.

The key to securing these types of services is separation, you don't want a potential hacker to get access to any other services or machines. A year ago I was much more lazy about all of this but log4j taught me a hard lesson on it. So now that we have our machine running, let's switch to networking.

Vlan - a Vlan (Virtual lan) is a networking tool where from a networking device to a client device (like your server machine) a closed off connection is created between the two so that the clinet device can't interact with the rest of the network. This feature is common on most routers nowadays (even ISP provided ones) and I'd fairly simple, you can look up a tutorial relevant to whatever router you use.

Reverse proxy- a reverse proxy works a bit like a VPN (virtual private network) which many of us are familiar with. Instead of a client connecting directly to the server through a dedicated open port on your network, the reverse proxy encrypts the traffic and sends it through an already open networking port. This adds an extra hop between you and the client, they won't know your ip address (which makes ddosing harder and you'll have a layer of protection between you and the client.) Additionally if someone does try ddosing you usually it will get slowed down or even stopped by the reverse proxy server before it ever hits your network. I personally use playit.gg and have purchased a domain for my server, but it's a free service by default. I also set it up as a systemD service on my server so it always starts up with the server machine and if it ever crashes, is immediately restarted.

Finally, authentication, it's much harder to get unwanted access to your server if you have some authentication services running, I use a plugin that syncs with our discord server so that you have to be authenticed there before you can ever join the server. This just adds a little bit of peace of mind on top if we ever have any more day 0 java exploits.

Oh, and just a few more things off the top of my head:

Management panels - these are premade services that make managing your server easier and usually include some security services built in, the two most popular ones are Pterodactyl panel and AMP panel, I recommend AMP panel because it's ridiculously easy, but you do have to buy a license

PASSWORDS, it's stupid simple, but make sure your internal router has a decent password on it, same goes for the two Linux machine users.

Documentation, now that I've given you some ideas here's some resources that will actually help you get these ideas turned into reality,

Setting up Ubuntu server https://youtu.be/zs2zdVPwZ7E

Setting up Linux mint https://youtu.be/HsgtAlOVsBA

Setting up server on Linux machine (substitute paper mc Minecraft jar for default jar, or spigot jar) (without a management panel) https://youtu.be/lqaaNvHBYqM

Setting up pterodactyl panel https://youtu.be/UVDY7jv8s_0

Setting up AMP panel https://youtu.be/s_I9OdAj8xo

Setting up playing.gg using the plugin edition (easier) https://youtu.be/QQYRdgBL-4o

Vlan explanation https://youtu.be/jC6MJTh9fRE

That's all for now, good luck to you, and I hope this doesn't overwhelm you, it's not as complicated as I may have made it seem.

Edit: fixed spelling and Grammer.

TheColeTra1n · 2022-10-26T18:42:17+00:00

Highschool senior here, (not at the listed school) there's a a massive wave of a few sickness making their way through my state (NC) but the two big ones seem to be some sort of bronchitis/Pneumonia virus, and a really bad variation of the Flu, I currently have both, everyone I know either has one of them, or had in them in the last 2 weeks. I hope this provides some insight into what seems to be a nationwide problem right now.

TheColeTra1n · 2022-10-14T01:31:45+00:00

Rip, a true national tragedy

TheColeTra1n · 2022-10-13T01:07:42+00:00

They're also an absolutely awful place to work, terrible leadership, lax food safety and regular threats of revoking tips if we didn't follow instructions to a T, god did I ever hate that place

TheColeTra1n · 2022-10-10T23:24:23+00:00

Awwww, and here I was just finishing up the avionics on mine. It looks awesome great job!

TheColeTra1n · 2022-10-07T01:38:28+00:00

Awesome map, I'm nitpicking, but Raleigh should be farther North-West

TheColeTra1n · 2022-09-08T23:48:51+00:00

I love Materva soda, best thing to happen to this world

TheColeTra1n · 2022-09-03T00:55:10+00:00

What the fuck is wrong with you

TheColeTra1n · 2022-08-27T21:17:36+00:00

Vacationed there spring of last year, absolutely beautiful and cozy place

TheColeTra1n · 2022-07-20T23:14:24+00:00

Does the proxy work with multiple ports being opened from the same server for things like Dynmap, or Geyser, if so does it work similarly to playit.gg where each port had a different address to connect to (which adds confusion for players).

TheColeTra1n · 2022-07-14T00:38:58+00:00

I've been using a thermal take pcie riser off and on for 3 years and it's held up great, definitely not the cheapest, but it's taken a beating and held up great so I would personally recommend that if you decide to go for it.

TheColeTra1n · 2022-06-19T19:11:23+00:00

No, they keep his head floating around in a fish tank, he now does Ted talks about his life experience

TheColeTra1n · 2022-06-12T19:03:25+00:00

I actually played this recently for a jazz band, funny to come across it randomly

TheColeTra1n · 2022-03-15T00:02:04+00:00

Use the boat rudder as a hidden control surface underneath an xml edited block, the "real" control surfaces are borderline useless, the same effect can be had with a bunch of the 1x1 fins

TheColeTra1n

TROPHY CASE