Minecraft
My son wanted a Minecraft server to play on with a friend from school. We're going into a 5 day "hard lockdown" in Melbourne, so why not?
We already have a Realms server. I've spent a surprising amount of time exploring, making a few holiday houses and running track undeground. I want to keep that around. Minecraft is a recurring obsession with me and my kids. We've been playing it since they were quite little. I got it when it went onto iPad and was immediately obsessed. It's got that computer thing happening, just a little tweak here, and another there, and six hours have passed.
So my initial thought was to put a server on the raspberry pi. We have a couple of pi 3's kicking around, and with the NBN giving decent upload speeds it would be easy to attach it to the router and open a port.
Bedrock edition is just for Ubuntu, so I did an ubuntu server install and stuffed around configuring wifi and finding a USB power adapter with enough juice to power the pi. Lots of flipping between sources on my monitor to look things up. Overall, an enjoyable task if you like the linux command line and enjoy the "Adventure" like nature of this sort of thing.
Get the bedrock server onto the pi. Wifi's not installed. Get it on my mac and scp to the pi. Ubuntu isn't allowing the connection. Fine, scp from Ubuntu and source it from the mac.
Really it's the same thing as get the bird cage. Too far away. Fine, fetch the ladder to get the cage. etc...
Anyway, wrong executable format. Oh no, maybe I need 64 bit ubuntu. Reimage the card. Same error? Oh.... The Bedrock edition is x86 only. Raspberry Pi is ARM. Right. There's a blog entry where someone emulates it but it's slow...
In the meantime, the java edition works (after getting java from oracle) -- but it can't be used by iPad clients.
So we have an old pc from about 2004. No wifi of course. Dusty.
I could probably do a USB install of Ubuntu, and set it up like I was going with the raspberry pi. But it's much bigger. There will be fan noise. In the middle of trying to find a place on my desk where it could be attached to power, the network and a keyboard I realised the machine didn't even have HDMI out. Just VGA. So my monitor probably has a VGA input and I do keep every possible cable for just in case, but...
This blog is running on a cloud server hosted by Binary Lane. It only costs $4/month for 1Gb memory, and 20Gb disk. A few minutes later I had a working internet connected cloud server with it's own subdomain. And a few minutes after that, the x86 Ubuntu Minecraft bedrock server was working. It's fine so far.
Tags: computing
