I'm in roughly the same boat as you (minus the multiple instances). My personal Minecraft server I run on a machine sitting behind me at home for friends uses SRV records. I bump the port number each "major" version release (yeah, I know, "minor" version in semver semantics) in case I ever have to run a previous version for whatever reason. This gets reflected in the SRV records. I've never actually had a reason to do this, but it's there if I need to.
Or at least that's the theory. I haven't updated it for 1.18. Not sure I will unless I run Tekkit or something in the future.
He’s scanning IP addresses, not dns names, so there’s no easy way to get SRV records. He could first do a reverse DNS lookup, but that would slow things down tremendously and also there are many, many Minecraft servers running without DNS names
We have not played since MS started effectively requiring a phone number from every Minecraft player.
As I have already been using AWS and this was not at all business-critical, I did not care about vendor lock-in and thought of it as an exercise in how much I could delegate (neither letting random visitors access our dashboard, nor spending time implementing custom auth). Their JS SDK documentation wasn’t great, but after some digging it was somewhat straightforward to make a fully static SPA (hosted on S3) access specified AWS resources (per IAM policy) on behalf of authenticated Cognito user.
The app also “integrates” with Discord to ping a channel on each instance start/stop, but that is merely posting to a webhook URL.
I wrote it in React and TypeScript with a bare-minimal Babel + Webpack configuration but it could just as well be written in vanilla JS.
As to the server, it is plain Ubuntu with a cron job that periodically tries to launch MC server if it’s not already running (or something silly like that). Another cron job publishes stats to DynamoDB (IAM policy allowing the instance access the table), and I wanted to add yet another job to generate a PNG with a pretty map of the spawn.
I do vaguely remember one of these, "I scanned the whole internet! It's easy!" stories from years ago where the author wound up receiving an email from someone at Electric Boat who told them, "Please don't portscan us. We're required to call the FBI when it happens." Your host would probably be "very annoyed" if they received one of those, but I doubt anyone cares enough to send such a message nowadays.
This one? http://census2012.sourceforge.net/paper.html
My favorite part is the animated day/night cycle at the end.
I expect if author had launched it through CGNAT, someone wouldn't have been pleased. (Correct me if I'm wrong)
Is that just a quirk of how the mod names are reported and folks are really running newer stuff? Are older modded servers still popular? Are the servers themselves mostly old and no longer used?
> Welcome to the brand new HarvestCraft for 1.14.4 and beyond! Please read carefully as this is NOT a update of Pam's HarvestCraft but a re-boot.
1.14.4 is 3 years old, but many (many!) servers are still running on 1.12 or older versions if doing modded. There simply isn't an incentive for many mod owners to update their mods to the latest version, so the "community updates" as a whole are generally quite slow and people end up stuck on their favourite version.
Edit: Looking at the article, they also only analyze Forge mods. On newer versions, other mod loaders are gaining popularity, whereas Forge is the de-facto mod loader for 1.12.
[0] https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/pams-harvestcra...
There is quite a strong incentive. What there is not, is means — Forge and Minecraft have both changed dramatically between versions, to the point that many mod developers throw their hands up in the air and rewrite the mod entirely. For something complex enough that that isn't an option, for instance Electrical Age, it's easy to remain stuck on an older version forever.
There's no documentation, and the API owners often assume that forcing a complete rewrite of major parts of the mod is fine. It's really not.
Very enjoyable read and even more interesting results. 4 Minecraft servers per 10000 people in Germany is kind of insane to think about.
What was the number 2? The author made it sound like it was the US, but that has 4x less
> This is probably thanks to cheap hosting offerings from companies like Hetzner (insert link).
Conflicts with their own data:
- OVH 24,417
- QuadraNet 9,927
- GPORTAL 9,339
- GMO Internet 5,466
- Hetzner 5,327
For those not in the game server hosting scene, it's because OVH offers a robust DDOS system for free for their servers. The price is not much different either. OVH is by far the leader for ALL game servers due to DDOS protection, price, and value. Hetzner is good, but OVH is a league of it's own.
> However, Germany ends up taking the prize for most Minecraft servers per capita, with a whopping four servers for every 10,000 people. This is probably thanks to cheap hosting offerings from companies like Hetzner.
Hetzner is a German company, OVH is not. And while OVH has a presence in Germany, if we run this query on Shodan: https://www.shodan.io/search?query=product%3A%22Minecraft%22... OVH is #8 while Hetzner is #2. So I'm not sure why you'd think this is advertising, they're merely providing an example for Germany.
That being said, GPortal is also a German company and #3 overall, but they're a dedicated provider of game servers, rather than commodity servers. Conspicuously absent is Nitrado - also a German company - probably because they run most of their servers on non-default ports, whereas GPortal assigns each server its own IPv4 last I checked.
> That being said, GPortal is also a German company and #3 overall,
Gportal (Ociris GmbH) is #1 in Germany, by far. 8,291 (24.2%) vs 3,380 (9.8%)
> but they're a dedicated provider of game servers, rather than commodity servers.
Why does that matter? The statement is about Minecraft servers and why Germany is popular.
Seems if you were going to name drop one to support that reasoning you'd use the most popular one.
Heztner is neither the leading Germany Minecraft provider, nor the leading overall provider, both by a wide margin.
I appreciate you joining HN to comment and clear that up though.
It would be interesting to see a similar census, and if it's gaining any ground.
Whitelist your private servers!
I’m surprised that VPN usage isn’t more common for minecraft players.
I also needed tune SQLite recently for an event logging server, and "PRAGMA journal_mode=WAL" helped a lot.
If you're just scanning one port, which the author seems to have done, you can probably do it in some minute or two, unless you wanna play nice and lower the rate of sending packets.
Otherwise if you wanna scan full IPv4 + all ports, it'll take a couple of minutes at least. Masscan with the right hardware seems to be able to do it in five minutes or less.
> YES IM STILL SITTING IN THE SAME SPOT I WAS THE LAST TIME YOU SCANNED ME AN HOUR AGO.
[1] https://phiresky.github.io/blog/2020/sqlite-performance-tuni...
I had never seen some of this IP charting and stuff and in his video he does a lot of similar stuff.
160,992
