Tech Article 1: Technical Setup

Hey everyone,

It's "The Tech Guy" here, and today I'm kicking off Article 1 of my technical series for the work done on our Minecraft setup, with the aim to help and inspire other technical minds, regarding how Minecraft can be setup and utilized in a school.

Setting up Minecraft in most instances is a majorly basic task if you have no desire to modify the game or its parameters in anyway. However should you wish to modify the game and the settings it runs from, the setup can get a little more complicated, and in turn you will require better hardware the crazier you wish to get. This process is then considerably more difficult when running the server inside of a school, and yet another tier of difficulty is involved if running the server inside a school, and wishing to communicate with the outside world.

So far we have our server running internally only, but we plan to soon extended our capabilities to being able to run the program amongst other institutions across Victoria and New South Wales.

Running Minecraft with verified Minecraft accounts inside State schools can be a little tricky, as all student traffic is filtered, and Minecraft traffic is filtered out. To get around this, it was necessary for me to modify the batch script used to start the server, and inject an unfiltered proxy into the Minecraft client, so that traffic could therefore be passed, and accounts verified.

As our setup is currently only being used internally, it made the initial setup quite easy, though we were to have our share of problems, mainly due to the fact that we were going in blind.

Technical specifications of initial setup:

-Dual Core Windows based VM with 8GB of RAM

-Running CraftBukkit as our server
-Running manually through a batch script with several modifiers
-Up to 24 players connecting at one time
-Running several administration based plugins

.bat file used for launching our servers:
 

java -Xms4G -Xmx4G -Dhttp.proxyHost="PROXY" -Dhttp.proxyPort=800 -Dhttps.proxyHost="PROXY" -Dhttps.proxyPort=800 -jar craftbukkit.jar -o true --nojline

PAUSE