Hello all,

 

My niece has gotten into Minecraft in a big way. She wanted to know about renting a server, but my Unraid box is on all the time anyway, I was wondering about setting it up to host games for her and her friends there.

 

1.) I tried searching the forum first, and found some results but they weren't very specific to my needs; such as the guy who wanted help creating a package for Unmenu. 

 

2.) I'm a pretty novice linux user. I was able to get Unraid up by myself without issue, get Unmenu and some plugins installed, I know how to use telnet and screen and do preclears; but installing packages and stuff, I'd really need some hand-holding.

 

3.) My build is a Norco 24 bay, with a Supermicro C2SEA, a Celeron E3400, 2gb of ram. I currently have 5x 2tb drives and am using Unraid Server Pro 4.7.  Will my hardware support this? I can't imagine ever having more then 4 users simultaneously.

 

4.) I'm not using a cache drive, currently. I do, however, have a spare SSD I can use for this purpose if I need to. Do I need to have a cache drive for this?

 

Thank you for any advice you guys can offer on this.

Glad to hear your niece is into minecraft. I love that game and I run my own server. I too have thought about running it on my Unraid server. Yet I don't know very much about Linux, but I do know a lot about minecraft. From my personal experience with my server I can tell you a few things. First off a Celeron processor is probably not enough. I have a dual CPU 8 core Xeon system and it lags up with minecraft sometimes with just me and a few friends playing on it. Also 2GB of ram is most likely not enough. I have 8GB and have seen minecraft use as much as 5-6GB. Minecraft works on Java and it's a memory hog, with quite a few memory leaks. I know it can be done and YMMV but my experience says don't run it on your hardware. Sorry I don't have a better solution for you.

 

-Alex

I run a minecraft server on my unraid, but not directly. It exists as a dedicated virtualbox machine, using mineos. My unraid box is an E8500 Core 2 with 8GB of RAM, and the mineos vm is allocated one core and 2GB of RAM, and it gets its own IP from the router, so I don't worry a whole lot about opening up a couple ports directly to it. I don't use the standard port numbers externally, I redirect a few high number ports externally to the standard ports on the vm.

 

All this to say it's probably possible with your CPU, but only 2GB of RAM could be problematic. I personally have no interest in running it directly in unraid, so I'm probably not going to be much help there. If you upgrade your RAM, and you successfully install virtualbox, I can share my current running mineos vm with you. It's not perfect, as it's not completely compatible with the newest server jars, but it's functional with 1.3.2. Some of the custom web management stuff doesn't work as well as it should, and the author of mineos doesn't seem to be very motivated to update it.

Thanks for the advice, guys.

 

I am pretty sure I left some spare RAM at my sister's place when I built her PC; let me see if I can upgrade the ram.

 

Shes running the out-of-the-box version of Minecraft with no mods, skins, or addons of any kind, pure vanilla.

I've got a minecraft server running at home, also not in UnRaid. I'd recommend using a different PC that's on all the time and running a VM.

 

Setup a VM of Ubuntu (really pretty easy). VirtualBox and VMWare Fusion are both free and will run on just about anything. Then just follow the minecraft instructions to install the server inside the VM. Set a static IP for that VM inside the OS and then port forward on your router.

 

The only downside is that it requires a second PC to be on all the time. But WAY simpler. Then you can start to get into other VM stuff because the box is already there, up and running.

Thanks for all the advice guys. I will be installing extra ram sometime this weekend and then going from there. If I don't have enough CPU, then that's OK.