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A Census of Minecraft Servers

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Re: A Census of Minecraft Servers

#21

Post by poink »

jrmg wrote: post #16

I’m kind of amazed that you can still do massive scans like this and not face some bad consequences like getting blocked somewhere, or having your hosting provider get very annoyed at you.

Your host isn't likely to care unless it causes them grief. There are so many scans happening at any given moment I doubt any of the targets will notice yours.

I do vaguely remember one of these, "I scanned the whole internet! It's easy!" stories from years ago where the author wound up receiving an email from someone at Electric Boat who told them, "Please don't portscan us. We're required to call the FBI when it happens." Your host would probably be "very annoyed" if they received one of those, but I doubt anyone cares enough to send such a message nowadays.

Re: A Census of Minecraft Servers

#22

Post by andai »

poink wrote: post #21
jrmg wrote: post #16

I’m kind of amazed that you can still do massive scans like this and not face some bad consequences like getting blocked somewhere, or having your hosting provider get very annoyed at you.

Your host isn't likely to care unless it causes them grief. There are so many scans happening at any given moment I doubt any of the targets will notice yours. I do vaguely remember one of these, "I scanned the whole internet! It's easy!" stories from years ago where the author wound up receiving an email from someone at Electric Boat who told them, "Please don't portscan us. We're required to call the FBI when it ha…

>I scanned the whole internet!

This one? http://census2012.sourceforge.net/paper.html

My favorite part is the animated day/night cycle at the end.

Re: A Census of Minecraft Servers

#24

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

ryukafalz wrote: post #5

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.

> 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

Re: A Census of Minecraft Servers

#26

Post by H8crilA »

"Fun" fact: Microsoft set up Minecraft to be open to everyone by default. Consequence: griefing groups that scan the web and blow the ever living shit of whatever they can find on those random servers (TNT blocks can be supplied by item duplication exploits): https://youtu.be/hoS0PM20KJk

Re: A Census of Minecraft Servers

#27

Post by strogonoff »

Our Minecraft server is spun up only when we play, with a simple bespoke front-end that allows any Cognito-authenticated user to start or stop the AWS instance. The dashboard also shows an auto-updated leaderboard with some in-game stats (death count, miles traveled, last login and so on), stored in DynamoDB and periodically updated by a cron job on the server. I also planned to add a map of the spawn, but not sure if that’ll happen.

We have not played since MS started effectively requiring a phone number from every Minecraft player.

Re: A Census of Minecraft Servers

#28

Post by beaconstudios »

H8crilA wrote: post #26

"Fun" fact: Microsoft set up Minecraft to be open to everyone by default. Consequence: griefing groups that scan the web and blow the ever living shit of whatever they can find on those random servers (TNT blocks can be supplied by item duplication exploits): https://youtu.be/hoS0PM20KJk

Yup, my family minecraft server fell victim to that. Thankfully it was a new map with only a couple days' work into it, but annoying nonetheless.

Whitelist your private servers!

Re: A Census of Minecraft Servers

#29

Post by NelsonMinar »

Filligree wrote: post #12
Forricide wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people still run on older modded versions. To use the example you gave, HarvestCraft 2's CurseForge page[0] says: > Welcome to the brand new HarvestCraft for 1.14.4 and beyond! Please read carefully as this is NOT a update of Pam's HarvestCraft but a re-boot. 1.14.4 is 3 years old, but many (many!) servers are still running on 1.12 or older versions if doing modded. There simply isn't an incentive for many mod o…

> There simply isn't an incentive for many mod owners to update their mods to the latest version There is quite a strong incentive. What there is not, is means — Forge and Minecraft have both changed dramatically between versions, to the point that many mod developers throw their hands up in the air and rewrite the mod entirely. For something complex enough that that isn't an option, for instance Electrical Age, it's…

It's a miracle that the Minecraft mod scene exists at all. The old MCP project that made tools to decompile the obfuscated code to something readable and then recompile it again was just the most remarkable hack. I guess that's years out of date now and I vaguely recall Microsoft was more open to supporting mod authors in recent years. But I guess from this discussion it's still kind of a mess.

Re: A Census of Minecraft Servers

#30

Post by ruune »

ryukafalz wrote: post #5

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.

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