• IP Address: 128.195.133.148

• User accounts: with SS2K domain account or local user “mcuser” (password in KeePass)

• Local group: “mc-research” is setup with write access to the necessary directories for managing spigot and minecraft server instances. The mcuser and certain domain accounts are setup as members of this group.

All scripts can be run with the “--help” option to get more detailed usage information. For more details about how to use the scripts, see the sections below.

• spigot-build.sh [version] - rebuild the spigot.jar, optionally to a specified version number
• start-mc.sh [port] - start a new minecraft server instance on a random port, or the optionally specified port

When the start-mc.sh script starts a minecraft instance, it runs it in a screen so you can connect to the server console later to check it or to give it the “stop” command

screen names will be of the format “mc-<port>”

• screen -list - list the currently running screens
• screen -r mc-<port> - reconnect to the screen named mc-<port> which corresponds to the minecraft instance listening on that port number
• screen -dr mc-<port> - forcibly disconnect existing connections to the screen, and reconnect, essentially taking over all other connections

Spigot is a community built minecraft server which is supposed to be high performance and make it easier to work with server plugins. The researchers need this instead of the vanilla minecraft-server.jar because they use specific plugins that work with the spigot.jar server.

You need to re-build spigot.jar each time there is a minecraft client update. As of this writing, minecraft is on version 1.13.2, but version 1.14 is in pre-release and my Java Edition client updated to 1.14. You will need to make sure that the correct version of the spigot.jar file is in your minecraft server directory.

You can build spigot using a simple script on the server:

spigot-build.sh [version]

This means you can just type “spigot-build.sh” and hit enter to build the “latest” official release (not pre-release). If you want to build a pre-release or older release, you need to type the exact version number you want, like this “spigot-build.sh 1.14”

You can run “spigot-build.sh --help” to get a brief description of the script and usage information.

The result of this script is a file called spigot-<version>.jar where <version> is the actual version number. If the script is able to, it will try to copy this file into the TEMPLATE directory used by the start-mc.sh script (see below), and setup a symlink to it called just “spigot.jar”.

Old versions of the file spigot-<version>.jar are saved in an “old” directory under /usr/local/spigot. If needed, you can look there for a specific version number rather than rebuilding it. You would have to copy the desired version into the specific minecraft instance location, or to the template if you want to update the template, and then create a spigot.jar symlink pointing to it.

The minecraft template directory and each specific instance under the named <port> directories must have a spigot.jar symlink (a symbolic link) that points to the desired version of the file. For example, you might have a spigot-1.13.2.jar file and a spigot-1.14.jar file, but whichever one spigot.jar points to is the one that will be loaded:

# change directory to the template directory (where you want to copy the new spigot-version.jar file to)
cd /usr/local/mc-research/template
# copy the desired version of the file into the template directory
cp /usr/local/spigot/old/spigot-1.13.2.jar ./
# remove an existing spigot.jar symlink, if there is one
rm spigot.jar
# create a new symlink (format is "ln -s <linktarget> <linkfilename>")
ln -s spigot-1.13.2.jar spigot.jar

FINISH ME :)