Saturday 14 April 2012

Meet The Operating System


For this server, we chose CentOS 6.2 - a version of Linux. We specifically chose CentOS for a few different reasons. We have used it before for other servers and found it to be easy to set up, easy to add programs (and remove them - even remotely), it was very slim on resources (it only uses 400mb of ram after first boot, before the Minecraft server is started), it's very fast and very reliable. CentOS is very secure because of it's built in firewall, permissions systems, intrusion detection systems, and it's Kernel. In simple terms, CentOS was the right choice, it is Open source, and it was free of charge.

Kienan's main desktop is based on Fedora, which uses the same packages and tools for making programs, which makes developing updates and testing changes very easy for us since we already have the development infrastructure in place and ready to go.

One caveat is we knew we would have to install extra repos for our automatic updates to work (which will be using cron to schedule updates and reboots nightly) - specifically the rpmfusion repos. In order for that to work, we had to first enable EPEL from the official CentOS repos.

More information to come! Comment below with any questions you have!

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