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Architecture

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DaMarine edited this page Dec 25, 2024 · 36 revisions

OUR DOCUMENTATION HAS MOVED TO SLABSERVER.ORG!

Introduction

Our game servers are hosted on a dedicated Ubuntu server in Falkenstein, Germany, rented from Hetzner as a custom AX42 machine. Alongside the standard 2x 512GB SSDs configured in RAID, we’ve added a 1TB SSD for non-Survival game servers, and a 22TB HDD for backups and cold storage.

To configure and manage our game servers and various community bots on this Ubuntu server, we rely on the Pterodactyl server management panel.

Game Servers

Pterodactyl runs all of our game servers in isolated Docker containers. We can then manage these game servers through the Pterodactyl UI panel, as well as the SFTP access it provides. Pterodactyl

We use two BungeeCord servers, referred to as our Proxy server, to connect several servers together. These Proxies help to keep our whitelist and banlist consistent across all of these servers, and Proxy 1 plays an instrumental role in the Resource World experience. This is explained further below.

While all these servers sit alongside each other, the diagram below represents the visual hierarchy that takes place.

Game Servers

Bots

While detailed here in their own section, these bots are hosted and managed via Pterodactyl much like our game servers. In fact, for Pterodactyl and Docker there is almost no functional difference between a game server and a bot. Hosting these bots via Pterodactyl helps to keep most staff applications managed through a single functional UI.

Bots

We run bots on our dedicated server for the following use cases:

  • Applications bot
    • Posts server applications in an #applications channel, sends whitelist command to our servers.
  • Modbot
    • An IP sharing, FAQ posting, ping checking, timezone converting, server restarting, reminding (and plenty more!) bot.
  • Chester
    • Our wonderful Modmail bot, that will forward any DM you send it to a private staff channel, for all of the team to see.
  • Emoji Roles bot
    • Assigning roles when reacting to certain messages, as seen in our #welcome channel.
  • Playerlist bot
    • Handles checking player count and player statuses across Survival and Resource servers when !playerlist is used in #ingamechat.
  • Snacker/Inactivity bot
    • Posts Etho-themed welcome messages in #general. Assigns member the Inactive role if they do not speak in the Discord for three weeks.
  • Music bot
  • ErGoBot
    • Runs automation tasks on our Pterodactyl servers based on API responses from external services, for example Mojang's version manifest.

Proxy Servers

Our proxy servers handle connections to all other game servers that sit 'below' them in the hierarchy. Proxy Servers

Both Proxy servers utilise a shared set of MySQL databases for a number of use cases:

  • Whitelist database
    • Writes to this database to whitelist new players.
      • NB: Our whitelist applies to all servers within both proxy servers.
    • Reads from this database to authenticate connections.
  • AdvancedBan database
    • Reads from this database to prevent banned members connecting.
      • NB: Our banlist applies to all servers within both proxy servers.
  • LuckPerms database
    • Reads from this database to synchronise permissions across the Bungee network.
  • PremiumVanish database
    • Reads from this database to synchronise staff members vanished status across the Bungee network.

For all of our databases, phpMyAdmin provides a useful web interface for access and administration.

Main Network

Our main network handles the survival and resource world, and collectively is considered to be our "Main" server.

In addition to the Proxy Databases, we use more MySQL databases in the main network for the following use cases:

  • Resource World Gatekeeper database
    • Writes to this database to save entity data before transferring servers
    • Reads from this database to load entity data upon transferring servers
  • CoreProtect database
    • Writes to this database to log player progression and history
    • Reads to this database to restore previous server data
  • Plan database
    • Writes to this database to log player analytics

As noted in the diagram, the Resource server does not interact with the Survival server directly, and vice versa. Players transferring from one server to another will go via the Proxy. The same is true of chatlogs too - note that messages are also not sent from the Resource Server to #ingamechat directly.

Backups

Our backups work through a combination of Restic and Backblaze. Restic provides automated incremental backups solution for all our server data, while Backblaze provides us with insanely cheap external storage, to avoid the dedicated server being a single point of failure. We currently keep between 28 and 42 days worth of incremental backups on Backblaze, to balance the amount of available backups with the costs of storing and pruning this data. Pruning down to 28 days is run on the 1st and 15th of each month.

External Backups

Rendered with Diagrams by mingrammer

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