Synology NAS Minecraft Server Administration

Update: I will be maintaining the following page with the most up to date information:

http://blog.heatdfw.com/p/synology-minecraft-server-setup.html

Last month I wrote a post about how I modified a package to install a basic Minecraft server onto my Synology NAS.  Once you run the package your server will be running with default settings.  If you're like me, the question is, "Uh, now what?"  When I picked up the project, I knew exactly nothing about administering a Minecraft server, so I have been stumbling through this.

So, first a little primer, without any extensions, a Minecraft server will be a single world, either creative or survival.  The settings for the server will be in /volume1/@appstore/Minecraft/server.properties.

Command Line:

You can telnet or SSH into your Synology once you've turned on the Terminal service in "Control Panel-> Terminal & SNMP -> Terminal -> Enable Telnet/SSH service." Once you log in with your client of choice you can manually edit this file using VI.  This is, of course, how I did it at first. If you're not used to using a Linux command line and/or you've never used VI, that will quite likely be a painful experience.  Even if you used to use VI a bit but that was 20 years ago, you're going to struggle a bit.  A few client options:

• Windows includes a telnet client.
• Lots of people like PuTTY.

Synology DSM Interface

Unfortunately, DSM (currently 5.2) doesn't have a built-in way to easily deal with editing your config files.  Fortunately, there are third party solutions!  There is a "config file editor" package linked below:

http://www.mertymade.com/syno/

I've gone ahead and hosted this in my repository for convenience.  NOTE:  You must have Synology's Perl package installed for this to work, so install it first if you don't already have it installed.

Once you have it installed (you can run it from the Package Center), you can open it and set it up to edit your Minecraft config files.  Under "Choose config file" select "Config File Editor" and add the following lines:

/volume1/@appstore/Minecraft/server.properties,Minecraft-properties /volume1/@appstore/Minecraft/white-list.txt,Minecraft-whitelist /volume1/@appstore/Minecraft/ops.txt,Minecraft-ops

I added them at the top of the list, right below the row of # signs, since they were the main files I wanted to edit with this utility.  Now you'll have to close down config file editor and restart, and voila, you'll have access to your important files.  This won't get you away from using a command line, but it will get you away from VI.

When you add names to the ops.txt and the white-list.txt files, Minecraft will import them on startup, and rename the .txt files to .txt.converted.  The actual data will be stored in similarly named .JSON files that will have the UID's associated with each user name, like this:

[
  {
    "uuid": "xxxxx-xxx-xxxxx-xxxx",
    "name": "username"
  }
]

Once you're up and running, as an op you can whitelist people from the in-game command line and not worry about editing these files.

To Be Continued

I will come back and edit this as I have a chance.

Links

Below are some useful Minecraft Server Admin Links:

• http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/support/server-support/server-administration