Operating System for system

Well - after a little discussion with others about the operating system used for a TW Quake server I decided to install the Debian Linux operating system. One of the reasons for this choice is I am familiar with the Debian system so administration of the system will not be a vertical learning curve.

One nice feature of the Debian system is the ability to do a net-installation. In other words you just download a portion of the system (core) and then install the rest of the system from the internet. Since the system can be installed in different configurations you decide what the main configuration is by the application you are performing with the server - be it a web server, file server, workstation, etc. The advantage of the net-install is you only download the pieces of the system you need for your specific configuration without having to download most all of the pieces needed for each possible configuration. In the present configuration I used the system is only using around 200-megs of downloaded files totoal whereas I had downloaded the CD or DVD images I would need to download about 10-Gigs or so of ISO files.... just a little bit of difference.
Of course the down side is I have to use the Internet to install any new parts to the system since I do not have local copies...

I configured the system with a Workstation GUI interface and Standard Install - basic configuration so as to make life a little easier using a GUI (Graphics User Interface) instead of the CLI (Command Line Interface). Given the machine has all sorts of "spare" processing power I did not see any reason not to install the GUI to make life easier in the administration and maintenance departments (grin). Since the machine has a X-Windows GUI and the CLI I can access it either through a remote SSH X-Terminal session or use a SSH Telnet Session to access the CLI and not have to worry someone can "monitor" the access to the server from the Internet.

After the Debian system was loaded I ran the "top" command to see how things stacked up. Here is a snapshot of the information:

Here is the "top" command output for the system:

top - 14:36:04 up 1:21, 6 users, load average: 0.22, 0.19, 0.12
Tasks: 161 total, 2 running, 159 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu0 : 1.4%us, 0.6%sy, 0.0%ni, 97.2%id, 0.6%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.3%si, 0.0%st
Cpu1 : 1.7%us, 1.1%sy, 0.0%ni, 96.6%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.6%si, 0.0%st
Cpu2 : 1.4%us, 0.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 97.5%id, 0.6%wa, 0.3%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Cpu3 : 3.1%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 96.6%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.3%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 2076852k total, 574436k used, 1502416k free, 46316k buffers
Swap: 2719736k total, 0k used, 2719736k free, 207656k cached

That is with multiple X-Windows login sessions running on the box (not even breaking a sweat!). I doubt the Quake server will even cause much of a load on this beast. One of the X-Windows session is a remote session to my home workstation which makes configuration work much easier! Gotta love "easy" The above information means the machine is barely even running - more like "loafing" along! Since the Debian system detects the two Xeon processors as 4 processors I really doubt there will be much load on the system - even if there were 16 quake servers running at the same time on the machine.

more to follow.

The Hardware

Since a quake server does not really consume a great deal of computing resources (as compared to the newer games out there) the server hardware does not have to be the newest and greatest out there - unless you are looking for bragging rights - then you have to ask yourself "How expensive should my bragging rights be!".

The server I decided to use is a Dell 2650 with Dual-Xeon processors running at 3.0 GHz. Since the system will be running Linux instead of WinDoze the memory requirements are much more reasonable - seems the Microsoft theme with hardware is to write mediocre code then make up for it with really really really fast processors with goobs and goobs or memory resources!

My favorite saying is this "Microsoft Windows is the Operating System that can take a great computer and turn it into a rather dull one!" Not trying to start the ole Microsoft vs the other OS war - just stating plain facts - ever wonder why most large companies run Unix or Linux for their servers???? Hmmmmmm???? There is a very good reason!

I degress - the machine has 2-Gig of 533-MHz ECC Ram memory (ECC is error-correcting memory) and 5 each 73-Gig 160-MB/sec (megabytes per second sustained) SCSI drives which are going to be configured as one pretty good size virtual drive in the system.

The Dell 2650 also has 2 10/100/1000-baseT ethernet interfaces so it should work in most any environment I place it in.

That's it for the hardware side of things - more to follow on the Operating system being used (hint: it will NOT be Microsoft windows in any shape or form!) :)

Building a TW Quake Server

Most people don't know me by my real-life (RL) name... but some may recognize my gaming name: SeeMeRun[F8S]. I began playing Quake around the middle of 1997 and was fortunate enough to meet a person by the name of Thomas Bescalia - he also goes by the gaming name of FaTe[F8S] and is the leader of the clan FaTe's Minions, which is where the gaming tag "[F8S] comes from (it stands for FaTe's). Thomas introduced me to the gaming world of Quake, specifically the ThunderWalker version of the game and I was hooked!

Most people who have been playing First-Person-Shooter games for a long time will remember one of the first, really fast action, games called Quake (or also referred to as Quake-1). This game was developed by Id back in the mid-late 1990's and to this day has not been equaled in "Speed" of the game. This blog is about creating a TW Quake 1 server - the trials and tribulations and the reasons for the different configuration decisions taken in both hardware, software, Operating System and specific Quake server.

More to follow: SMR[F8S]