building new server.

[Hvc801]

Hello everyone. I'm not sure if any one knows of the game - ragnarok Online, but im an avid gammer of one and enjoy playing on private servers. Im looking to go forward and build my own server to host my own private ragnarok server. I'm not quite sure what everyone uses to provide lagless gaming and great service for the gammers, and this is what im asking you guys. I'm an experienced computer builder, but have never built a server computer. I'm not so sure on which windows server operating system to use or what type of power i should be running to keep the server up 24.7. any help or suggestions on this topic will be greatly appriciated.

p.s.

This is going to be a home server, so im also woundering where i would be able to store the server, and about how much it would run up my electric bill.

p.p.s

Also if you look into the game, its a decent sized game and needs to be able to hold atleast 2,000+ members.

 

[xtremezx2]

looked at a few sites on google and it seems that it doesn't take much to have a ragnarok server

check this link.
http://www.moddb.com/forum/thread/starzinger-ro-a-custom-ragnarok-online-server

The specs are:
Pentium 4 2.0 GHz
768 MB DDR RAM
40 GB 7200 RPM Harddrive
10mbit BROADBAND Connection

Basically just has an old P4 with the ragnarok server software on it. As you can seen he has a pretty solid connection, this is what will make it or break it for you. With that many players and connections you NEED a good and fast connection. If you wanted you could probably run it from xp, but you could probably use server 2000 or 2003 (possibly even linux, but I don't know anything about the software they use and if its compatible.) Hopefully this helps. I used to have some friends that played that game, but I never got into it.

 

[Hvc801]

Thank you so much. I have right now a Verizon FIOS connection and its pretty damn fast for me right now. Another thing is, are there any good book i can read for beginners on server administration and creation??

 

[bilbus]

Building a server is the same as building a pc.

Windows XP is fine for your OS.
Only thing you need is a decent disk IO system. I would buy a motherboard with 4+ SATA disks.

I would also buy a board that supports raid, either NV raid or Intel storage matrix.

I would buy 4 drives and configure them in raid 10. If you dont want to buy 4 drives i would buy 2 drives and use raid 1.

 

[WeeWoh]

For that job, you'd probably want a Windows 2k server, but just watch antivirus etc. Youd need a fast connection more than anything else, and a few not-so-powerful servers, or a very powerful one. (Its probably better to go for the multi - system approach, as if one goes wrong, skip it and get another one)

 

[bilbus]

What advantage would a server OS get him. No server based apps are bing installed (Ms sql, iis or exchange)

If you are running into tcp-ip limits you can remove that. Rather then buying server 2003 or 2008 ror $600-800, i would run the patch from this website
http://www.windowsvistaplace.com/remove-windows-xp-sp3-tcpip-connections-limit/downloads

You will not be able to have 2000 users on a single server. These online games consist of dozens of game servers, storage, and sql servers, fast routers and network connections.

If you want to play online with 20 or so friends perhaps you will be ok

The home router you have will not be able to handle a large number of connections.

 

[Evil Prince]

Be aware that FIOS has no port 80 access, so your server will be hosted at something like http://mygamingdomain.com:8080

 

[J03]

Be aware that FIOS has no port 80 access, so your server will be hosted at something like http://mygamingdomain.com:8080

I doubt that it would use port 80 anyway...

 

[MidwestComputer]

or you can run Ubuntu 8.10 server and I am running 3 sites on my home server with FTTH connection. I love my ISP because they give me a static IP address. if your FIOS is on DHCP you want to get a static IP address 2 if you wanna run a server. Also look into smoothwall for a good router basically you would use a old PIII or P4 with 1GB memory and 20GB with couple GB ethernet adapters.

 

[wmorri]

...if your FIOS is on DHCP you want to get a static IP address 2 if you wanna run a server.

This isn't entirely true. You can still run a webserver if you have a DHCP connections. All you need to do is get a dns name from a site like dyndns.com. Then you can just set it up in your router if you have the capability, or you set it up in your config file.

Smoothwall is an ok firewall but you really don't need it as long as you have a good router with a firewall. I don't know why you would need more than one NIC though, your not running a DHCP server. (But that would be a great other thread).

Cheers!