OpenArena Message Boards

Hey guys, I'm trying to ask for a dedicated server of OA in excange for ads with a local hosting service. The thing is that I need to know the minimum, the ideal and the optimal specs for a dedicated machine running an OA server and how much bandwidth would it eat. Also I need to know if I can run multiple servers on the same machine and if I need special instructions or just to execute each server process as a different user.

The Servers I have in mind are with 16 slots each, one CTF, one DM, one Team DM and a domination server.

Thanks for reading!

HI guy,
the server hosting 0x2A (081 CTF) and 0x2C(071 defrag) is:
 * cpu: PIII 900 MHz
 * ram: 512 MB
 * network: adsl connexion with 1Mb/s upload

Last time I've look at bandwidth, each client takes 2/3 kB/s. You can of course run multiple server on the same machine. Bots can takes a lot of cpu: 20/25%, so don't use a lot of bots. We have one oa installation for each dedicated server in the same user home. We use unionfs to share pk3 between the dedicated server.

Thanks a lot for your tips, I'm readinf about unionfs right now.

Another thing: I'm assuming that for every server instance you specified a different server.cfg file. Did you made something else?

Thanks again (:

I'm not sure you need "unionfs".

- You don't have to run your server under different user accounts ; works fine as is with my two 0.8.1 servers hosted on the same machine.
- All you have to do is specifying a different .cfg file when starting the server from the command line. Of course, listen to some different UDP port.

Check the wiki, some links about Q3 (also apply to OA) show you how to run a server using screen command and which is kept running after user logs off. ;)

To be more accurate:

  * we use 2 installations in 2 differents directories: ~/ctf, ~/defrag
  * in each directory we unzip the openarena archive
  * we set up config files in each directory: baseoa for ctf and defrag for... defrag ;)

The problem is that ~/.openarena is common to every running instance.

To keep things clean, we use 2 directories for our maps repository : ~/maps-defrag for defrag maps and ~/maps-ctf for ctf maps. Then we use unionfs to "union" ~/maps-defrag and ~/maps-ctf in ~/.openarena/baseoa.

You don't need to do that, but we like doing things the cleaner way.

The same way, instead of using "screen" command, you can do a clean init (/etc/init.d/openarena-ctf) script that launch your servers when the machine boot up.

Our configuration is more complicated but you better have to start with simple things.

@mathieu: In fact it seems more complicated that way, I thought you used unionfs to share common maps between the two installations and reduce HDD usage.

You can use "+set fs_homepath ~/.openarena-somethingelse" to seperate configurations under the same user...

Now place the configurations in ~/.openarena-ctf and ~/.openarena-dm and start two instanses with different homepaths. They will then load there own configuration.

There's already plenty of DM/CTF servers out there. What about an Overdrive server?