Setting up the Jaunty Server

The goal of this document is to describe the hardware and software configuration of the Jaunty server for future reference.

Revision: 01.2025

Hardware

Jaunty is hosted on a DigitalOcean Droplet — one of their cloud-hosted virtual private servers. In the interest of accommodating every player as much as possible, the server is hosted in DO's NYC3 region. The current hardware is as follows:

CPU: DO Regular, 8 vCPU cores RAM: 16GB Disk (SSD): 155GB

Software (base)

Operating System

At the very base level, Jaunty runs on Ubuntu 24.10 and version 6.11.0-13-generic of the Linux kernel. Remote access is done via SSH, which has been configured to disallow root login and the use of password authentication. A separate user account has been created and added to the sudo group; the server process runs under this.

Shell

Jaunty uses fish as a shell, trading portability for a generally better syntax over other shells.

config.fish

set -gx EDITOR vim

Text editing

Editing configurations, scripts, etc is all done using the stock version of vim that comes with 24.10.

.vimrc

autocmd FileType yaml setlocal ts=2 sts=2 sw=2 expandtab

Backups

Jaunty's choice of backup tool is rclone; currently v1.60.1-DEV is installed. Backups of the server are taken nightly and synced to a Backblaze B2 bucket. Files within the bucket are retained for 3 days before being purged. See #docker for the script.

Process management

Historically, a lot of tutorials would suggest using screen or tmux to keep long-lived processes (e.g. Minecraft servers) running while disconnected. This always felt very janky to me; I never liked doing it. Nowadays, I would argue the most common method would be to run the server in a container.

docker is Jaunty's chosen method of maintaining the server process. It does not come pre-installed with Ubuntu, but it can be installed by configuring apt to use Docker's sources¹. We also make a point to install the compose and buildx plugins as well. We're running version 27.4.1 of the engine and client.

Software (Minecraft)

Server

As per mentioned, the server is ran with Docker. The itzg/minecraft-server image has become the defacto standard in recent years due to its extensive configuration and excellent support. Rather than the vanilla server, we use Paper — a fork of Spigot, which is in turn a fork of Bukkit. Paper is pretty opinionated in its decisions, but the performance boost it brings to the table is substantial. Beyond Paper, there's also a few plugins installed:

• Chunky — automatically generates chunks in a radius
• Simple Voice Chat — implements proximity-based voice chat into the game
• AxGraves — places a "grave" in the world upon player death

Footnotes

1. https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/ubuntu ↩