Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ajmurmann 406 days ago
Family game server going down can be very stressful, especially if you have kids.

Also, I've had phone tech support sessions with family that were more stressful than calls with large banks who were worried about losing very large amounts of money in case of an outage. Different stressful, but nonetheless...
2 comments
strogonoff 406 days ago
> Family game server going down can be very stressful, especially if you have kids.

Telemetry does not address this, though. Shoving it into a container and assigning it a simple “restart if down” rule does. Minecraft is a flaky beast, if you run snapshots and/or mods. Metrics or not, often “start again” is all you need.

Furthermore, this is a game that adds new gameplay features multiple times per month. If you do not update it frequently and your kid misses out on a new mob, you run into the same stress. Containerizing it makes the upgrade very straightforward, and once you run a couple of containerized instances… Do you not struggle to see the value of detailed system monitoring?

link
mmanciop 405 days ago
> Telemetry does not address this, though. Shoving it into a container and assigning it a simple “restart if down” rule does.

A Systemd unit as shown in [1] does it too without using containers and with fewer moving parts of using containers. I use containers every day at $work. I have been using containers since before Docker was a thing. In this case, it's entirely overkill: Systemd units use the important things like cgroups already.

For the upgrade: depends. You do need a container image regardless, and I have not seen official ones. Upgrading servers in Minecraft requires upgrading clients to match, and my kids prefer to play, more than upgrade. (Unless a biome is released. Then it must be immediately available to them.) But then again, I just need to download the binary with a cURL call. And if the configurations change, Docker won't help me there one bit anyhow.

[1] https://github.com/dash0hq/minecraft-server/blob/main/drople...

link
strogonoff 405 days ago
There are no official ones (Microsoft profits from operating its own servers, why would it make things any easier), but there are community-maintained images.

I found that vanilla server is insufficient and an ability to declaratively define mods, the seed, OP players, etc. through container environment is very important for iterative evolution, but of course this is individual.

link
mmanciop 405 days ago
Indeed.

My personal definition of nanosecond is the time passing between the Minecraft server having a hiccup, and the first scream piercing the air.

The printer not printing is DEFCON 5 material.

link