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- Jan 21, 2013
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Hey it is Doomsider again with another project for Starmade. I want to present to everyone the story of how and why I started the North American Starmade Server (NASS) and in the process hopefully help others start servers themselves.
The why is easy to explain. At the time I was playing there were simply no reliable North American servers. I also had a history working with Linux and thought it would be a fun and rewarding project to start. I have had a blast playing Starmade and now that there is so much more interest in the game I think a tutorial on how to create and run a Linux server is in order
Due to my poor home internet connection I could not host a server at home so I had to find a remote server to handle the job. I settled on Digital Ocean because it was only $5 a month and you could instantly scale servers which came in very handy for NASS later on. I have no affiliation with this company but I am going to use their service as an example for this.
Getting Started:
Download Putty and Winscp locally. These programs will allow you to login to a remote server and access its file system in a more friendly manner. You may want to grab Notepad++ in case you want to edit files in windows and then put them onto you Linux server.
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html
http://winscp.net/eng/download.php
http://notepad-plus-plus.org/
Sign up for Digital Ocean and create a new droplet. Put in a host name and select your size/region/image. For this example I will be using Ubuntu 13.04 X64. Create the droplet. You will recieve a email shortly giving you IP and root password
Login with putty with the username root and the password provided
Install Java and development environment (dev is optional)
sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jre openjdk-7-jdk
Get Starmade
wget http://files.star-made.org/StarMade-Starter.jar
Update and Install Starmade files (this could take a long time be patient)
java -jar StarMade-Starter.jar -nogui
Make starmade script in Starmade folder executable
chmod +x /root/StarMade/StarMade-dedicated-server-linux.sh
Run starmade
/root/StarMade/StarMade-dedicated-server-linux.sh
That is it! You can now log on to this server with the IP address and port 4242. The first thing to do when you log in is to /add_admin yourself if you haven't already edited the admin.txt in the starmade folder.
Of course there is a lot more complexity if you want it. For example if you close this terminal window the server will shutdown. You can use the command screen to keep it running or run the server in the background with a cronjob.
You can also adjust the command line arguments in the script file to adjust memory usage and use other java tweaks. There are also a bunch of config and text files in the starmade folder you can open and edit to adjust the server.
Don't forget winscp which will allow you to log in to the server and drag and drop files which can be handy. Also use notepad++ with the appropriate settings if you are going to edit in Windows then copy to your server.
It is reltively easy to setup a server and it is a great learning tool for those willing to try and it can be very cheap with the right provider.
The why is easy to explain. At the time I was playing there were simply no reliable North American servers. I also had a history working with Linux and thought it would be a fun and rewarding project to start. I have had a blast playing Starmade and now that there is so much more interest in the game I think a tutorial on how to create and run a Linux server is in order
Due to my poor home internet connection I could not host a server at home so I had to find a remote server to handle the job. I settled on Digital Ocean because it was only $5 a month and you could instantly scale servers which came in very handy for NASS later on. I have no affiliation with this company but I am going to use their service as an example for this.
Getting Started:
Download Putty and Winscp locally. These programs will allow you to login to a remote server and access its file system in a more friendly manner. You may want to grab Notepad++ in case you want to edit files in windows and then put them onto you Linux server.
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html
http://winscp.net/eng/download.php
http://notepad-plus-plus.org/
Sign up for Digital Ocean and create a new droplet. Put in a host name and select your size/region/image. For this example I will be using Ubuntu 13.04 X64. Create the droplet. You will recieve a email shortly giving you IP and root password
Login with putty with the username root and the password provided
Install Java and development environment (dev is optional)
sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jre openjdk-7-jdk
Get Starmade
wget http://files.star-made.org/StarMade-Starter.jar
Update and Install Starmade files (this could take a long time be patient)
java -jar StarMade-Starter.jar -nogui
Make starmade script in Starmade folder executable
chmod +x /root/StarMade/StarMade-dedicated-server-linux.sh
Run starmade
/root/StarMade/StarMade-dedicated-server-linux.sh
That is it! You can now log on to this server with the IP address and port 4242. The first thing to do when you log in is to /add_admin yourself if you haven't already edited the admin.txt in the starmade folder.
Of course there is a lot more complexity if you want it. For example if you close this terminal window the server will shutdown. You can use the command screen to keep it running or run the server in the background with a cronjob.
You can also adjust the command line arguments in the script file to adjust memory usage and use other java tweaks. There are also a bunch of config and text files in the starmade folder you can open and edit to adjust the server.
Don't forget winscp which will allow you to log in to the server and drag and drop files which can be handy. Also use notepad++ with the appropriate settings if you are going to edit in Windows then copy to your server.
It is reltively easy to setup a server and it is a great learning tool for those willing to try and it can be very cheap with the right provider.
