Minecraft!

Minecraft is a fun game to play, if you aren’t familiar with Minecraft then you’ve been under a rock for a very long time. You should ask someone about it and get your head out of the sand.

I have a computing family, my wife and I enjoy computing both personally and professionally. We’ve also tried to instill this love of computing in our two girls. At this point our entire family have their own computers and we play Minecraft with each other on a regular basis.

The Setup

I run a Fedora server with Docker to manage the Minecraft servers. The storage I use for the servers is ZFS. The combination of these three technologies support the services I use at home, including Minecraft.

The Minecraft server bundle I end up downloading through the Twitch Client on Windows. They’ve been really good at providing server packs. They usually come as a ZIP file and I create a docker volume backed by a ZFS mounted file system. These are both manual processes though.

docker volume create ftb-vanilla
zfs create zpool/ftb-vanilla
zfs set mountpoint=/var/lib/docker/volumes/ftb-vanilla/_data zpool/ftb-vanilla

Then I can unpack the server bundle into the docker volume and start it using a standard java container.

docker run -d --name mc-ftb-vanilla -p 25565:25565 -v ftb-vanilla:/data:Z -w /data openjdk:8 /bin/bash LaunchServer.sh

There is plenty more you can do when running your own DNS and multiple Minecraft servers on one host.

• https://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx/9765/2208/how-can-i-link-my-domain-name-to-a-minecraft-server
• https://www.noip.com/support/knowledgebase/how-to-add-a-srv-record-to-your-minecraft-server-remove-the-port-on-the-end-of-the-url/

This gives you the option of running Minecraft on different ports but allowing the clients to just use a standard name (i.e. ftb-vanilla.example.com). This is easier for kids to type into the Minecraft launcher.