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A Census of Minecraft Servers

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Re: A Census of Minecraft Servers

#61

Post by strogonoff »

trutannus wrote: post #52
strogonoff wrote: post #27

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 i…

What's the latency like with that? When a user causes a wake event, how long until the server is live and ready to play? What sort of wait system do you use? This sounds really cool.

In my setup it is instance start + cron job timer + MC server initialization. AWS instance wakes up pretty quickly, cron job is configurable (I set it to 15 seconds or so), MC may depend on the size of the world and any mods I suppose (we played vanilla). All in all took between 40–100 seconds I think.

Re: A Census of Minecraft Servers

#62

Post by hardwaresofton »

hunterb123 wrote: post #60

The subtle advertising: > This is probably thanks to cheap hosting offerings from companies like Hetzner (insert link). Conflicts with their own data: - OVH 24,417 - QuadraNet 9,927 - GPORTAL 9,339 - GMO Internet 5,466 - Hetzner 5,327 For those not in the game server hosting scene, it's because OVH offers a robust DDOS system for free for their servers. The price is not much different either. OVH is by far the leader…

Are you in the game server hosting scene? Curious how you came by such an insight

Re: A Census of Minecraft Servers

#63

Post by Zancarius »

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.

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.

Re: A Census of Minecraft Servers

#64

Post by _dpyi »

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.

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

Re: A Census of Minecraft Servers

#65

Post by shadowfacts »

alar44 wrote: post #50
shadowfacts wrote: post #32

I... kinda can't believe that one of my libraries (Forgelin) is the second most common mod on all Minecraft servers. It doesn't support the five most recent versions of the game and I haven't touched it in years. I guess there are a lot of other mods (or a few really popular ones) for somewhat older versions that use Kotlin.

It's super common to run older server versions due to mod support. Unless there's some new mechanic in an update that people want to use, not using the latest version isn't really a big deal. Easiest to grab the mods you like and just freeze it.

That part doesn't surprise me, it's just the sheer magnitude of 41% of modded servers that's shocking.

Re: A Census of Minecraft Servers

#66

Post by hunterb123 »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #62
hunterb123 wrote: post #60

The subtle advertising: > This is probably thanks to cheap hosting offerings from companies like Hetzner (insert link). Conflicts with their own data: - OVH 24,417 - QuadraNet 9,927 - GPORTAL 9,339 - GMO Internet 5,466 - Hetzner 5,327 For those not in the game server hosting scene, it's because OVH offers a robust DDOS system for free for their servers. The price is not much different either. OVH is by far the leader…

Are you in the game server hosting scene? Curious how you came by such an insight

I used to run a few big private game servers, yes.

Re: A Census of Minecraft Servers

#67

Post by dwild »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #24
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

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.

Re: A Census of Minecraft Servers

#68

Post by 8note »

Zancarius wrote: post #63
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.

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 r…

1.18 is gorgeous. You're missing out

Re: A Census of Minecraft Servers

#69

Post by SirGiggles »

lostlogin wrote: post #57
alar44 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not more common because it doesn't really make sense.

Can you explain this a bit further? Is white listing users the way to avoid it? I’m possibly too cautious and only have a couple of ports allowed though.

In essence, without knowing much more about your setup, you're just shifting responsibility somewhere else.

Whitelisting is the route most (no actual statistics to backup, but based on personal intuition) would take because the server can prevent a connection after making a authentication (online-mode=true) and authorization (white-list=true) check.

Mesh like VPN solutions used to be popular in the past with software like Hamachi but, at least in my experience, performance was dismal and required additional setup for potentially non-technically minded end users.

Re: A Census of Minecraft Servers

#70

Post by der_rod »

hunterb123 wrote: post #60

The subtle advertising: > This is probably thanks to cheap hosting offerings from companies like Hetzner (insert link). Conflicts with their own data: - OVH 24,417 - QuadraNet 9,927 - GPORTAL 9,339 - GMO Internet 5,466 - Hetzner 5,327 For those not in the game server hosting scene, it's because OVH offers a robust DDOS system for free for their servers. The price is not much different either. OVH is by far the leader…

You have to take the quote in context:

> However, Germany ends up taking the prize for most Minecraft servers per capita, with a whopping four servers for every 10,000 people. This is probably thanks to cheap hosting offerings from companies like Hetzner.

Hetzner is a German company, OVH is not. And while OVH has a presence in Germany, if we run this query on Shodan: https://www.shodan.io/search?query=product%3A%22Minecraft%22... OVH is #8 while Hetzner is #2. So I'm not sure why you'd think this is advertising, they're merely providing an example for Germany.

That being said, GPortal is also a German company and #3 overall, but they're a dedicated provider of game servers, rather than commodity servers. Conspicuously absent is Nitrado - also a German company - probably because they run most of their servers on non-default ports, whereas GPortal assigns each server its own IPv4 last I checked.

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