Introducing civilfritz Minecraft

I started playing Minecraft with my brother and old college roommate a few weeks ago. My expectations have been proven correct, as I’ve found it much more compelling to play on a persistent server with a group of real-life friends. In fact, in the context of my personal dedicated server instance, I’m finding the game strikes a compelling chord between my gamer side and my sysadmin side.

There’s already some documentation for running a Minecraft server on the Minecraft wiki, but none of it was really in keeping with how I like to administer a server. I don’t want to run services in a screen session, even if an init script sets it up for me.

I wrote my own Debian init script that uses start-stop-daemon and named pipes to allow server commands. Beyond that, I made a Puppet module that can install and configure the server. You can clone it from Git at git://civilfritz.net/puppet-minecraft.git.

I also really like maps, so I started looking for software that would let me generate maps of the world. (I was almost pacified when I learned how to craft maps. Almost.) I eventually settled on Minecraft Overviewer, mostly because it seems to be the most polished implementation. They even provide a Debian repository, so I didn’t have to do anything special to install it.

I’ve configured Minecraft Overviewer to update the render once a day (at 04:00 EST, which hopefully won’t conflict with actual Minecraft server use), with annotations updated once an hour. You can see it at http://civilfritz.net/minecraft/overview.

I couldn’t get Overviewer to display over https for some reason I don’t understand yet; so all access is redirected back at http for now.