Server Requirements

[oragle]

A friend of mine just moved into his new house and have got a 200 mbit up/down connection so we have decided to make his basement into a server room

We have decided that we would like to make some kind of Counter-strike Source homepage / community and host a bunch of CS:S free for all servers with different mods..

Related to this i have a few questions i hope some of you could help me out.



1. we are gonna buy new hardware and make our own server.. where we would like to have 8 game servers running on it.. is it possible to run all of this on one server?? what hardware would be required i would like if you could come with some examples of motherboards, cpus and how much memory..

1 x aim headshot only 16 slots = 16
2 x aim map servers 16 slots = 32
2 x gungame server 24 slots = 48
3 x deathmatch servers 24 slots = 72
= 168 total player slots
No bots is gonna be present on any of the servers.


2. should i go for windows or linux setup ?
if windows which server edition
if linux which distribution is best for game servers

i have a little experience with linux from school but i wont be able to make my own linux kernel.. any place where i can download allready made kernels and just install that would be good for ffa servers ? if linux is the best choice offcourse…


3. any guides around for installing multiple game servers on 1 server? a link would be very appreciated. And how to set affinity ( 1 cpu for each srcds host )
and what tickrate should be used for a good free for all server ?



4. what web configuration system for source servers do you guys prefer ?



im new to game server but i have been trying to read up from other posts i just think i would be very disappointed if i by mistake bougt hardware for a lot of money and it would’nt be able to do what i wanted it to do..

so all the help i can get is very appreciated

Sorry for my bad english.. if you need more informations just ask and ill try to provide a answer for you.

Roasty / Denmark

[down-south]

Here you have a link with a guide to set up both windows and linux. there are some illustrations, where you can see how much bandwith and memory you need: http://www.cstrike-planet.com/tutorial/1-Creating-a-Counter-Strike-Server
I would suggest, that you install at least 8GB of DDR3 RAM in your server, and a Intel Core i5/i7 with 2.8GHz og higher as CPU. It would also be a good idea to make a backup of your servers, once a month or something like that. Each gameserver uses about 4GB of harddiskspace, so I think about 500-640GB 7200rpm harddrive will be good.
If your not are not confident with non-GUI(console, commandprompt) i would suggest you used windows. For our servers we use a old laptop with an AMD Dual-Core 2GHz CPU 4GB DDR2 RAM, 160GB 5400rpm Harddisk. We host to servers with 20 slots each. Our server runs windows webserver 2008 R2 Service Pack 1.
To give you an answer on how you're going to have more than one server on the same pc/network, you just need to assign different ports, and make sure that they are forwarded in your router configuration. For example, our first server has port 27015(default css port) assigned, and the second one has port 27014.
as you forward 270000-27015, you can place the ports of the indivdual servers.
Also it would be good to have a Fast DL system/server: http://zwipe.net/
At the site zwipe.net, you can get a website for free which you can use as Fast DL. But you only have 100MB pr. site. I would suggest creating 4 sites and have Fast DL for 2 servers on each site. We use zwipe.net ourselves.
If it is a little bit hard to understand what I write in english, I can send you all what I just wrote in a Private Message in danish if you want, as I can see you're from Denmark
Just try following the guide in the link above, and return here if you have any questions

[oragle]

Hey down-south thanks for your reply

So do you think this hardware will do the job ?

Core i7 I7-950 8 MB (Intel Boxed) = 4 kernels with hyper-threading – 3.06 GHz - socket 1366

Gigabyte GA-X58-USB3 (rev. 1.0) = I/0 controller (intel ICH10R) - chipset (ICH10R)

Corsair Vengeance 3 x 4 GB = 1600 MHz - PC3-12800

WD Caviar Blue WD5000AAKS 500 GB = 7200 rpm – Sata-300

[down-south]

Yes, that configuration will do it.
If we're going to talk Operating System, I think the best choice would be Linux. The problem with windows is that there is almost no free antivirus for windows servers out there.
I would suggest Ubuntu: http://mirrors.telianet.dk/ubuntu-releases//natty/ubuntu-11.04-desktop-amd64.iso
The link is for the version that suits your configuration best. It is availible in multiple languages. If you don't wan't to burn a cd/dvd with the installationfiles, there is a guide attached on this post, for windows, mac and ubuntu

[Mooga]

Running all of those servers on a single box could get a little bloated depending on traffic. I'm not too sure on how CS:S performs since it moved to Orangebox.

If you know Windows best, use Windows. There really are no major differences when it comes to performance of a SRCDS server.

I also did configurations and changes directly on the server. There is some free web-end software... but if you have local access, there is no reason to mess with it.

[oragle]

would it be better for me to buy 2 smaller machines and run 4 server on both or what do you think mooga ?

[BehaartesEtwas]

(05-29-2011, 01:53 AM)oragle Wrote:  would it be better for me to buy 2 smaller machines and run 4 server on both or what do you think mooga ?

yes that would probably be better. I just wanted to suggest this :-)
But nevertheless that i7 should be able to handle it...