I’ve been kicking around the idea of running a server for games and chat woth some of my friends, but worry about everyone getting cut off when there’s a disruption.
I’ve started looking into kubernetes out of curiosity, and it seems like we could potentially set up a cluster with master nodes at 3+ locations to hose whatever game server or chat server that we want with 100% uptime, solving my concerns.
Am I misunderstanding the kubernetes documentation, and this is just a terrible idea? Or am I on the right track?
Kubernetes is too much. You could set up a matrix server for chat with jitsi for video meetings. Use element as client. Then add your game server(s).
For matrix/jitsi server setup use this playbook https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy
It installs all you need for video, audio, and text chat.
Maybe change the config to be unfederated if you want a private server.
100% uptime is really not feasible so forget that. Even the commercial servers have downtimes.
If I run this stuff, what do my clients / less techy friends need to install to get a Discord-like experience for screenshare/IM?
A browser. Element web client and jitsi client are included as browser clients. They could install element if they want a client software that automatically starts and is dedicated
This would allow them to share their screen + system audio excluding Element’s own sound while playing a game, like Discord does? No extra hoops like installing OBS to function as a webcam? If it really is that easy, I’ll absolutely install this stack as soon as I can. But every time I’ve tried discord “alternatives”, there’s always either a whole series of steps you have to jump through to screenshare (and forget about screen sharing a single app instead of an entire monitor, and forget about sharing sound without causing the streamer to echo the viewer’s voice), or the screensharing has multi-second lag (no matter how good the client and server’s connection is - testing this was done on purely local setups on Ethernet).
You’d think a direct peer to peer connection or “server” connection that’s… Functionally a peer would have less lag than the one that needs to phone home over the internet and perform downscaling on the feed to upsell Nitro, but that hasn’t been my experience.
Is a domain name required for this, or can you replace all instances of “example.com” with an IP address and port combo?
Try it out. You can try element and jitsi its free. Just test some matrix server with element web client and try out jitsi at their site.
For the self hosted instance yes I think you need a domain and subdomains.
What I was thinking of doing was having 2-3 separate boxes distributed between houses and could automatically switch which boxes handles resources when 1 goes down. No individual box would have 100% uptime, but you’d have minimal disruptions when any particular box has issues or needs maintenance.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like kubernetes works that way, and I don’t know of any software that would. Best bet now is probably to distribute backups between the boxes and manually spin up a secondary box when the primary goes down