[ryukafalz]

One thing the author may have missed here because I didn’t see it mentioned: this also misses any servers not hosted on the default port of 25565. I don’t know how common this really is, but Minecraft has SRV record support, and for those of us running more than one Minecraft server on a single box it’s likely at least one will be on a different port.

[teaearlgraycold]

It’s very common for cheaper Minecraft SaaS hosts to serve it on a non-default port.

[Zancarius]

Probably not common but definitely non-zero.

I'm in roughly the same boat as you (minus the multiple instances). My personal Minecraft server I run on a machine sitting behind me at home for friends uses SRV records. I bump the port number each "major" version release (yeah, I know, "minor" version in semver semantics) in case I ever have to run a previous version for whatever reason. This gets reflected in the SRV records. I've never actually had a reason to do this, but it's there if I need to.

Or at least that's the theory. I haven't updated it for 1.18. Not sure I will unless I run Tekkit or something in the future.

[8note]

1.18 is gorgeous. You're missing out

[trutannus]

25565 is less common than alternate ports from what I've seen. Most small, individually run, servers are not running 25565.

[_dpyi]

Extremely common on managed server providers, not so much on self-hosting. So, I think a vast amount is missing under the iceberg.

[ruune]

Yeah, I usually set up private servers to use some meme port and I'm sure that's not an uncommon practice

[TedDoesntTalk]

> Minecraft has SRV record support

He’s scanning IP addresses, not dns names, so there’s no easy way to get SRV records. He could first do a reverse DNS lookup, but that would slow things down tremendously and also there are many, many Minecraft servers running without DNS names

[dwild]

His point is that because of SRV record, using the default port is not needed, thus it's make it more likely that a server wouldn't mind being on another port.

[infogulch]

So a proper census would do a reverse dns lookup on every IP looking for a "minecraft" SRV record and connecting to that.

[ryukafalz]

That won’t get them all either, and likewise will only find one server per IP. The only really reliable way would be to scan every port to see if there’s a Minecraft server there, but that blows up the search space by quite a bit.

[duskwuff]

Reverse DNS lookups only return one designated name for the IP, not all records referencing the IP.