MoFo Gaming Community

Guys, I / we have looked at the idea of getting a "MoFo box" so to speek. I'm looking at ways to keep the price about the same as we are spending now, maybe even a little less.

The reason we are wanting to do this, other than the price, is to have control & to be able to host what we want when we want.

The long term plan is to host:

1 Tribes 2 public 16  Lak server
1 Tribes 2 Private 32 man server
1 Tribes 2 Public 32 man server
1 Raven Shield /Athena Sword Pub 16 man
1 BFVietnam Pub 24 man

And hopufully have some room left over to and a game or so.

Just give me your ideas and thoughts on this.

Thanks  :wub:

********Edit by Machine**********
I changed the player count of the Lak server from 32 to 16

Folks, what we have found is this.
For the price of a dedicated box we can greatly reduce the costs for the servers we currently have and have room for hosting other games as we (MoFo) see fit for NO extra monthly cost to us.
Which means......if we want to have a dedicated Joint ops, Halo, Half Life 2, Unreal, etc... we can get that (it would rawk if we were able to get a ded. 8 man C&C:Zero Hour server so we don't lag like whores on Monday).

you can't do that C&C deal....the game wasn't set up for it.  

What ever you guys think will work out the best.  As long as no one ends up spending a whole bunch of money to make this work.  I will always be able to pitch end financially with what is needed.
 

it takes more money to start it up.

But it would be 30 - 40 cheaper a month kind of deal.

sounds good  

It would be nice to have just one account to donate money to.

yup  :jab:  

i say  do it

Kewl kewl im for it!! and i'll start donating....(as soon as i get a credit card LOL )  


But what about having a RVS server AND as server running ? could that be done? so then we could hop from game to game as we choose :) :secret:  

We'll see. I know that RvS and AS are CPU hogs.

My idea is to have 2 RvS servers, one with some modded maps (that we have all installed)

Y'all just need to know that this will not happen without your help.

 

But won't having all of these games running off of the same server cause lag in the games?

And who plays Athena Sword still? I mean I haven't heard of any of us playing that game.

Another guy who has one of these servers is able to run well over a hundred players on multiple games without lag ever being an issue. And the box that we are looking at is going to be a lot stronger in the hardware department than the one he has.

ThE thing is going to cost a lot less a month to run all these games than we are currently paying now for just three games.  The biggest obstacle is that there is an unavoidable setup fee in the several hundreds of dollars range that we must pay before we get the thing.  Once we get past that hurdle, it looks like we should have all our server needs met for a long time.

 

i voted do it - i know i havent helped in the past, weird that i've already been in mofo for like... 8 months (expecting an edit) but as soon as i get a job and i get a base for myself in terms of cash, ill try to help - going to be rough though - car, appt, college - dont know how much spare cash ill have..

Edit - holy shit it's been over a year! jeeze... well this is definately the longest stay in one clan for me :) lookin forward to a few more years, too ;)

Oh and GFace - about the lag - all the servers we have now, run on boxes that have lots of other games/servers on em already. so the lag wont be any more (and probably less, actually) than we have on all our servers now.

sounds like a good idea.  what kind of specs are we talking when it comes to hardware?  as far as setup fee goes, how much exactly are we talkin also.  I have seen $100 for hypernia, and 350/mo premium server.  250 for the pro plan.  

This is what we are looking at right now...

Thoughts? :monkey:
 

bandwidth limitations?  What do we have, can't exceed, are we capped etc.?

 

anything else?

Sorry, did the same thing with JT.  Sonic and some guys I know had a colocation where the guy told him that their bandwidth was unlimited as long as it stayed under 3GB/s.  One month they peaked at 5GB/s for a short time during a transfer and the colo charged them triple that month for the overage.  I think they paid $600 for that month.  So when I say bandwidth, I am meaning the peak per second, is there a limit, have they capped it, etc?


 

Sounds like a pretty good plan. Having dedicated servers that we have the ultimate control over is always a good thing.  

RAM is essential.

I would recommend 2GB.

Do we know what type of memory this is?  RDRAM or SDRAM?

If it is SDRAM, hopefully it is DDR?

If DDR, what speed?

Why was the quote with ECC Registered memory?  I don't think we need this, this memory is typically used for mission critical systems and I'm not sure I see the need for it in a game server.

And, if I read correctly these are Xeon(s)?  2 of them?  Hyper-threading enabled?  Try to get the exact model so we can determine the cache sizes.  


 

they want $25 more a month per each additional 1/2 gig of ram.  That mekes this deal a whole lot less appealing in my eyes.  I'm worried enough about how we are going to pay $150/mo.  $200 a month makes this harder for me to stomach, in all honesty.





 

Is the bandwidth capped?  If not capped then is it burstable?  1200GB/month is a whole lot of bandwidth, but is there a bandwidth limit here?  Our first colo was burstable, and one of the guys we went in with decided to transfer some music from Georgia Tech, and was able to attain 6Mpbs upload speeds for roughly 30 minutes.  The colo tried to charge us for the 6Mbps rate for that month.  He had his own definition of the 95% percentile rule.  We argued with him, and he agreed to not charge us that rate, but we moved to a capped connection.  I have no problem with burstable as long we are getting good bandwdith and don't get penalized for exceeding some bandwidth limit (not the total bytes per month, but the sustained rate).

Second I think that memory is one of the more important things you can have.  I would say we could try it with 1 gig of RAM to start, but if we need more later are we gonna get screwed.  If we are then I say we get 2 gigs to start with.

Month to month is definitely good.  Gives you more power if you do wanna switch.

Another thing to consider is backups.  Colos typically offer this, but can be quite expensive sometimes.  Do we even care?  If all its going to have is game servers then I say no.  We can just make sure to backup our configuration files somewhere else.

Looks good to me so far.  If I think of anything else I will let you know.  :finger:  

I talked to a salesperson, although he didn't know shit he was able to give me some details about the RAM.

It is ECC DDR333


This is good.

Not the fastest, but will definitely be stable.


 

Also another thing to consider here is how do we get software onto the machine?  If we upload it then we are using our allocated bandwidth.  Do we get JT to go to Dallas to to install software?   :William_Hung_Owns_Chuck:  Tribes2 is roughly 500 MB which with their limit would allow us to upload it 2400 times in one month.   Not sure about other games.  :poke:

It doesn't seem likely we will use up our bandwidth installing software.  But our last colo it was definitely a factor.

Alls im saying is im glad we have the computer geeks involved now.

Makes me feel a lot better about what we might be getting into.



 :wave:  

Well, for that we really need to see exactly how many people are going to commit to putting in cash each month and take it from there.  

I'd love to fly down to TX to install some software :rawk:
Then I could hit the  :boobies:  bars with all the TX MoFo's (99% it seems like).

Count me in!!!  
OR
Mac, you could come to Tribal War West and hang out with us SoCal MoFo's and spend quality time whoring it up with us!!

 :guiness:  :finger:  :muha:  :poke:  

what.... all 2 of you guys.....

 :muha:  :wub:

If he comes to Tx he can hang with Me, Topo, JT, Kno, BM, Shr1ke,  and Rifleman.... and that's the start of the list.....

 :ninja:  :wub:  

im paying 140/mo just for BFV, so that is a deal

I do agree with everyone that RAM is a good thing.
We could max it out at 4096mb just add $200/ month

or we could just go up to 2048mb that'd just be $50/month more

I'll find out about the bandwidth.
If you want to take a look at the site fly at it

http://www.servermatrix.com (http://www.servermatrix.com) The server that we're looking at is called SuperXeon

hey im about to donate this month and dont know if i should wait or what  

ya donate all you want. The money will be used here one way or another :wub:

damn....servermatrix doesn't use paypal... :argue:

I am 90% sure that we could get more RAM later on. Just have to pay for the install and junk

i say start with 2gb ram. They will probably want to charge us a fortune to add it later. Plus the 100Mb uplink is necessity if you want to run all the servers you have listed, even then if they are all full even a dual P4 is going to start hurting. With one ut2k4 dedicated I can hit 75% cpu usage when changing maps and purging garbage on a 2gz with 1gb ram server.

Teamspeak really doesnt use any resources, i dont know about tribes, but i know raven shield and bfv will rape the server to death.

dont get too over ambitious with how many servers you think a rig like that can handle. A bfv server changing maps will destroy all the other servers on the same cpu, since im pretty sure bfv is not smp compliant....

In regards to cpu, I think the dual Xeons 2.4 with Hyper-Threading could hold one heavily used server in all 3 games at the same time.  Xeons can crunch a lot more(server type stuff) than P4's can and I think we will be very impressed by the capacity to deal with heavy loads.  I too agree that 100Mb uplink is a must.  And 2GB might be the road to take, I suggest getting a firm number on what it would cost to upgrade the memory in the future, and then decide from there.




 

you guys probably don't wanna hear this but..... Big Monkey has discounted servers from the same place chucky just mentioned.....^^^

I'll talk to him.

I already talked to him, hefe....we are looking at the same deal he is getting, upgraded just a little to handle the multiple games.

He was very helpful, in fact.

OH.... well nevermind then....!!!  :angry:  :cheers:  

This is what we are looking at right now.

Is it necessary to run windows, or can we run linux?

They want another $20 a month for windows.

I know T2 can be linux.  We don't know about T:V (can anybody take an educated guess?).

What about the other games?

Are they linux supported?

We got guys here that can handle a linux os...sonic, specifically.
 

www.raven-shield.com - System Specs, Minimum

Minimum Requirements

• Windows® 98/ME/2000/XP ONLY

RvS doesn't look like it's going to run on a Linux box..  
:group:  :leet:

Drat!

You can have paypal issue you a VISA on an account which you could use.  jobie did that last year for jobielan's expenses.   :lick:  

well we will stick to the 10mb uplink port till we need the 100 mb port.

so that's $219/month

The bandwith is anything going in or out of the network port. So that means uploading the software.

If only we had some members who lived in Texas that could go and install the software to save on the transfer. :secret:  

They wont let you in the Datacenter

so what good would that do?

me me me!!!!

 :wave:  or JT.... or maybe even BM.... :wub:  

web servers don't have / need CD rom drives. So just what are you going to do? If you were to even get in the DC.

Say hi to the HAWT chick woking at the reception desk :gj:  

I'm going to try to get this set up today after work.

coo chook cant wait

sounds excellent, once my college tuition is paid ill try to donate what i can, thats the only thing i have to worry about for the time being.


 

Done!

withen 24hours my friends.

I also uped the RAM to 2048mb

Ok,
Here is the list of games that are going to be hosted on the server (in no particular order).

Freecell
Hearts (can also double as reversi)
Diamond Mine
Doom (the Original)
Solitaire (sign up for team ladder)
Tetris/Ultra Tetris
Pong Deluxe
and of course everyone fave........Mrs.Pacman

I can't wait Chuck, thanks and yo0 rawk for getting it done so fast.
And I cannot thank the people enough who donated $$ on such short notice to get this project off the ground, as well as JT and others for taking the time to look for the best deals, work out plans, and even talk to the server reps live . :wub:  

Can we get Yahoo Pool on their as well purrty please with Saviors cherry on top.  :wub:  :angel:  

We got it

The RvS is almost set up

T2...should be done today


BFV on the server, just not set up yet.

I even got a back up TS server running.

 

How bout PocketPool2.0! It has a new multiplayer function. Ghost worked my shit for 3 hours when we played the Beta.





 :finger:  

Wo0t, thanks Chuck,Sonic,JT & Nox for getting things set-up. Let the games begin! :jab:


And Bops, I played a lil PocketPool2.0 Beta with Ghost too, I never got a shot cuz he kept running the table. :finger:  

Dunno what all was involved on the RS/BFV side of things, but much thanks to Sonic who went above and beyond setting this thing up on the T2 side.

All the T2 guys owe him a big kiss.

 :wub:

yup no lub for the cho0ksa  :wub:  

No, lotsa lub for you, chuck, because you busted ur butt, too, but I wanted to specifically say thanks to Sonic.  What he had to go through with all the problems and such, was a huge pain in the rear.

ya ya

I know :gj: