I don’t want to have to code anything.

You don’t have to code anything. You just look through the game system browser, pick what you want, and after a few seconds it’s installed.

We don’t need automation. I want simplicity.

Then screenshare over Discord while drawing things in MS Paint. It’s simple and it’s not automated, just like you asked

But, it’s not focused towards gaming.

Except it is

Unless you know the hours on a drive, you might get brand new ones, or you might get ones with 50k hours on them. They may also be from the same batch, which isn’t ideal for data durability.

If it helps, my strategy is to use RAID6 to handle up to 2 drive failures, and apart from the initial 4 drives needed to initially create the array, I just add another when I need more space. Then even if I get drives with sequential serial numbers, they’re going to have differing amount of life used.

Also, always keep a couple spare drives for quick swapping. Especially with RAID6 given how long rebuilding the array can take

Thank you for the feedback

What are you considering buying?

Mainly just the HDD’s. I already have a server, but having a bunch of extra drives for cheap is really tempting, especially since I haven’t filled out all of the bays

You can front any three un-clustered nodes with a load balancer to the same effect

Good to hear. Are there specific example you could point me to? I’d like to learn more

I do find it a little odd that you’re so concerned about uptime with a casual gaming server, but to each their own.

Personally, part of it is that I don’t want everything to be solely dependent on a box I own. I don’t like the idea of lording a petty fiefdom over my friends. If there’s multiple distributed boxes that are technically equal, then there’s less potential for interpersonal friction.

Also, while I have the more powerful server, I also have very little free time. If my box stops working for whatever reason, I don’t want my friends to have to wait 1-2 weeks for me to fix it

100% uptime is really not feasible so forget that. Even the commercial servers have downtimes.

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

But you could have a setup where one server hosts the game and syncs the game state with the other servers in the network, and if one server fails the network decides which failover server to connect to, all the clients connect to that server and continue playing on the new host.

This is kinda what I was hoping that kubernetes did. It’d be awesome if there was some software that automatically did the hand-off, but I haven’t heard of one either

Going through some of the more detailed responses, yeah this is probably the best bet, and it’ll most likely be my server that’s the primary. I’ve got a Jellyfin server / NAS with an Intel 12700k, and I could either simply add a docker container or dedicate resources via Proxmox.

Meanehile one of my friend is experimenting with an old $50 desktop with a 3rd gen i3. It’s… a decision, but he’s got more free time than I do

Thank you for the detailed explanation

It sounds like my friends and I are better off just having 1 primary server running everything, and pushing backups to 1 or 2 other servers that can be spun up if/when things go wrong with the primary server.

The game has to be made for it

Just for clarity, do you mean the game has to be made for self-hosted servers, or do you mean it has to be made to handle self-hosted servers across a cluster?

The former is already a thing with Minecraft, 7 Days to Die, etc. The latter… Yeah I’d have to do digging on that

Keeping it all one one LAN would defeat the point. I’m looking at avoiding downtime from internet and power outages, which would require separate locations

And 4x chance of some of the hardware failing and someone needs to fix it. Unless I’m mistaken about how Kubernetes works.

I’m pretty sure half the point of kubernetes is to have the server automatically reroute traffic when one node goes down

I’d rent one (small) VPS for $10 a month and split the bill.

We don’t want to pay for a VPS. We’ve been burned by that too often in the past were you go months paying for a minecraft server that noone is using after the first month

Jellyfin and nyaa.si are your friends

Sounds suspiciously like Peertube

Tbh, I pretty much never use site recommendations. I almost always learn of shows and movies via social media and memes

What also makes me sus is that if influencers are promoting lesser-known distros, it might be paid. Which is fine but could mean plans to monetize that distro in the future.

As opposed to Cannonical, which has been making slow pushes over the years to control Linux via Snaps?

I think a big part of why they talked about it in the video is to explain their base assumptions for the test. They’ve discussed it with Windows enough that they don’t need to say those anymore, but the Linux tests are new.

In addition, they do need to change theur workflow simply because they can’t use the same software and scripts for Linux.

They’re also addressing the reputation that Linux has among Windows users, even if that reputation is outdated

I disagree. Keep in mind that most people seeing the benchmarks will be windows users, and seeing Bazzite’s gaming performance along with it’s reputation for simplicity to set up and may help convince them to switch. Plus, anyone that had experience with Linux will know the link between it and Fedora, and can adjust expectations for theur particular distro