Hi,

I am interested in setting up a dedicated game server box that will be hosted from a data centre.

I am experienced in working in a Windows enviroment but i need the box to be LINUX. (this is new to me, but am a quick learner )

Now what i was hoping was that someone from this forum could help me understand what is going to be needed.

At this moment in time, my box spec will be something similiar to this:

RAID 1
P4 2.8
1gb ram
120gb HD
10/100 NIC Card
Redhat
Plesk 7

but am thinking of going:

P4 3-GHz
1gb ram
120gb HD
10/100 NIC Card
running in hyperthreading mode
Redhat
Plesk 7

This configuration seems to be able to handle any game hosted to date.

So heres what i would like help on,

I've heard that cPanel is tweakable were Plesk is not, you can only do whats on offer with plesk. How much £ am i looking at for cPanel?

I am new to linux as i stated above, so all info on how/what am going to need to do to setup this box up would be appreciated alot.

Guides/tutorials all welcome, as much info as possible is needed.

Thanks in advance,

Phil...

Welcome to the wonderful world of Linux (<<- is a Linux freak)! If you want to set up a server, there are lots of things that you will need to look at. I will give you a very basic roadmap to use.

1.) Find which distrobution (distro) you want to use. There are many on the market but some of the most common ones are Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSe, and Slackware. I personally am a huge Slack fan but it is a bit more difficult to set up than some of the others. Here is a good guideline to use: http://www.distrowatch.com

2.) What kind of programs does it need to run? I personally have never run a game server on Linux so I don't really know what it will entail. But one major important thing is to realize that Linux is NOT Windows and will NOT run most Windows Apps. For those apps you need to download Wine or WineX to run Windows 32 Apps.

3.) Next you need to download a distro that will work. Most are free (RedHat, Slack, Mandrake, etc. But you need to download them in .iso. Once you have an iso, you can burn them and load them. Download whichever one you want here: http://www.linuxiso.org

4.) Once it is loaded, the rest is simply READING THE HELP FILES. I cannot stress to you how important it is to do this! If you can read the help files then you can figure out lots of stuff from them.

I hope this is a good start up. The specs you listed sound fine to me. If you have any questions, just ask and I will help with what I can.

In regards to your other question personally, I would not recommend running plesk or cpanel on a gameserver machine, I understand the need for adding and removing users via a web control panel, and would personally recommend http://insomnia365.com. Their dedicated 'Cortex' control panel is far better for managing most of the game servers on the market, the other thing is that cpanel/plesk *both* take a lot more resources than they are worth if the primary purpose of the server is to game.

As far as price goes, cpanel/Plesk usually run the same price at most datacenters, between $20-$40 depending on the location.



*side note* this is the server I have:
https://insomnia365.com/servers/eegP32_order.html
and it runs great running RHEL*Red Hat Enterprise Linux* 3

linux is a great choice and it only takes some study to translate your knowledge...

There IS a beta add-on for cPanel which can be used to maintain gameservers (see http://forums.cpanel.net/showthread.php?t=30272 and http://cpgs.cpanel.net/), but as I've said, it is in beta. You can minmise the resources of a cPanel box if you know how.

M.