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How to set up a decentralized game/chat server (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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I've been kicking around the idea of running a server for games and chat woth some of my friends, but worry about everyone getting cut off when there's a disruption.

I've started looking into kubernetes out of curiosity, and it seems like we could potentially set up a cluster with master nodes at 3+ locations to hose whatever game server or chat server that we want with 100% uptime, solving my concerns.

Am I misunderstanding the kubernetes documentation, and this is just a terrible idea? Or am I on the right track?

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[–] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

I'd rent one (small) VPS for $10 a month and split the bill. As far as I know that's how most people do it. It's going to have >99.6% uptime, a fast datacenter internet connection at some central location and runs on enterprise hardware... The Kubernetes approach adds a lot of complexity, you'll have your games disconnect anyway once it fails over as you can't migrate the IP addresses. And there will be some additional traffic between the locations to keep everything in sync. And 4x chance of some of the hardware failing and someone needs to fix it. Unless I'm mistaken about how Kubernetes works.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    And 4x chance of some of the hardware failing and someone needs to fix it. Unless I'm mistaken about how Kubernetes works.

    I'm pretty sure half the point of kubernetes is to have the server automatically reroute traffic when one node goes down

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    But doesn't that require some software-defined networking or a special network setup? I'm pretty sure with the average home internet connection, you'll fail over to the replica at your friend's home. But that has an entirely different IP address and the game client will not handle that gracefully. It's going to disconnect. And you need to do some DNS as well to always point at the active server and forbid caching. In a datacenter or enterprise setting, sure. you'll just reroute the traffic and nobody will notice.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    I'd rent one (small) VPS for $10 a month and split the bill.

    We don't want to pay for a VPS. We've been burned by that too often in the past were you go months paying for a minecraft server that noone is using after the first month

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    Fair enough. I mean I'd pay about 200€ a year in electricity to run 3 efficient computers. And my VPS is only 73€ and I never have to pay for replacement parts (SSDs, harddisks) which I had to replace at home. And then they have gigabit network, low latency, a proper IP address, it didn't fail yet so their reliability >99.6% seems to be correct. And that's all way better than what I have at home. So it's a no-brainer to go for that. But your calculation might be different.

    I mean ultimately there is no harm in trying. If you have 3 old computers laying around, you might as well try setting up a kubernetes cluster. I think it's going to prove difficult to handle the IP addresses but I'm not an expert on high availability and gaming clients.

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