TMA: Server colocating

[friznit]

Currently renting a gaming server for £60 pm ("unlimited gaming bandwidth", whatever that means). Saw an sales offer for a rather shiny looking server at a reasonable price, but was wondering how much it would realistically cost to colocate at a DC. Assuming a 5punky level of MP gaming - say 3 or 4 games a week with no more than 30 people and the odd download, not hosting anything permanently so I'm guessing it's unlikely I'd need more than the some™ b/w allowance (e.g. website offering 1Tb coloc for £35pm).

Adv are more control over what I put on it, it's a much meatier server (equivalent rental costs would be in the region of £180pm), but downsides are of course no support, repairs ain't cheap, and I can't easily change it for an upgrade in 2 year's time.

What are your experiences with this (e.g. Le Gonque?)

[Dr. kitteny berk]

Will reply with wall of knowledge later.

[ProfHawking]

I set up a game server a while back, i think there was a thread about it in the Mod's forum. Anyway, long and short of it nobody showed any interest so i think I deleted it. But I could potentially give you a box to play with if you want it (At least until i need it for workies)

[friznit]

Long and short of it is, right now I'd quite like a server with a decent upload (dl & b/w limit not an issue) and a graphic card capable of running a DX9 game. I'm after running a Falcon 4 server for about 10 people on a semi permanent basis for the next 12 months or so. It needs to run the game proper though - there's no command line dedi server option (RPD is pretty much a must have).

Longterm, I'm interested to see if buying and colocating a box capable of running at least two ArmA3 dedi servers is more economical than renting.

Willing to fork out some, if it's reasonable!

[FatherJack]

A shame it doesn't have a command-line dedicated server, ones with GUIs consume more resources, need proper video cards and are sometimes troublesome over RDP (aka Microsoft Terminal Services) - as the RDP connection runs a virtual screen driver, which fails the DX9 check, plus is horribly optimised and slow, especially with animated menus.

Ways around it are to run Windowed and disable intro movies, etc, plus putting everything it needs to start a server in the config files and command line if possible and scheduling it to auto-start, as well as finding out if there's a web-based control panel for it. That has the advantage that various people can admin it without fighting over the RDP connection and potentially breaking it. Also, on Windows server, connect with 'mstsc -admin' to view the actual GUI showing on the screen on the box, instead of a virtual one which will time out after you close it as well as consuming yet more resources.

Alternatives to RDP which don't suffer from the virtual screen driver problem are VNC and TeamViewer - they just work by sending snapshot images of the screen rather than trying to emulate a virtual terminal. You can practice at home before deciding if you have a couple of machines by connecting to one over RDP and seeing if it will let you start it up.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

I think when I was doing it with tukkake it was £50/mo-ish for 100mbit/2TB, which is loads, that was poundhost in maidenhead, fwiw. (I was using a full tower, rather than a rack server, made it a bit more affordable to build the machine)

Additionally I was using TCadmin for server control (as you well know) at about a tenner a month, well worth it for 5punky use at the time, as I could offload a lot of work onto people who wanted their own stuff. FireDaemon is acceptable, but it requires the server to properly go down on it's arse to restart it, the weird hangs some servers do just confuse it, that and no web insterface is a pain in the cupcake.

There was some similar fucking about I had to do with Jops, which involved some wrangling with a software gpu iirc (on bukkake, I installed a half smoked 7900GT in tukkake, did the job fine)

Otherwise, I'd just suggest speccing pretty fucking high for the arma engine, it'll eat all the cpu you throw at it, ram is cheap, get lots. shouldn't need to worry too much about storage, these days I'd be thinking a magnetic drive for OS and storage, and a largish SSD for your servers.

Oh yeah, and if you're going down the consumer hardware route, buy a proper nic, the intel ones are lovely. they don't fuck up, crash horribly and cause you problems.

[ProfHawking]

Ahh, okies if you need graphics my boxes wont be any good, they are not geared for that at all. Prob best then yeah to go down consumer hw route to save money, but in that case you might have trouble finding somehwere cheap that let you stick a tower in a DC, most places are rackmount only I think.
You could try an ebay rackmount server and stick a reasonable graphics card in, but i'd expect its gonna be hassle to get one or get one to work with rackmount size and cooling shenanigans.

[Dr. kitteny berk]

just get a passive cooled half height card, you'll be right. summat like this