Connect to the hostserver

Hostserver

Welcome to the documentation for the Hostserver program. This short manual will guide you through the Hostserver system used at Farawayhost and will set you up with hosting your games.

A short tour

The Hostserver system has been designed with ease-of-use in mind. As such, you will find that the interface is kept simple.
So far, there are only two sections:

• The "My Games" section. In this section, you can manage the configuration of your games.
• The "Files" section. This section allows you to manipulate files.
• The "Subusers" section. This section can be accessed by clicking the "remote control" button on the far right of the panel.

One major change from conventional systems is that the Hostserver system does not have FTP support. Instead, all files are maintained through the program. Whilst some of you may complain about this lack of functionality, there is one advantage to having the program maintain your files: you can now manage archive files and even view/edit (save)files on-the-fly without having to keep moving them back and forth between the server and your computer.

My First Game

Managing your games has never been easier. In order to start, you just have to click the "Add a new game" button and specify a name.

You will then be able to access your game, and you should see a screen somewhat like the one to the left.

Status indicators

The game list has a series of status indicators. Below is the full list of possible images you can see, and their meaning:

The indicators are a handy way to determine the status of your games.

The configuration panel has several options.

• You can pick a name for your game. The name can be anything, so long as it is less than 64 characters. A case-sensitive canonical form of the name will be used for the game on the file system. In this case, "My First Game" translates to "MyFirstGame" on the file system.
• You can pick a port for your game. You can either pick from a list of ports that have been assigned to you, or you can have the port automatically chosen from the ports you have available when the server first starts up. If you have no available ports, the server cannot be started.
• You can now specify a couple of options an option.
  • If "Persistent mode" is checked, the game will keep running, no matter what. If it isn't checked, the game will automatically shut down once all players have left the server. Note that if "Persistent mode" is checked, the game cannot be run by players from the outside.
• The safety level of the world dictates what the world has access to.
  • Ultrasafe: the game has no access. It can't create any files, not even in it's own folder. This means no savefiles, either.
  • Safe: the game has limited access. It can create files within it's own folder (and subfolders thereof), but it can't do anything outside of its own space.
  • Trusted: in this setting, your game can create files outside of its own folder, and can put temporary files in the /tmp folder. In addition, it is possible to use the shell() proc and you can run .so files (Linux's version of DLL files) to perform advanced functions. Note that you cannot write in any folder apart from /tmp and /home/byond, although it may be possible to read some folders.
• The visibility level of the game defines how the game is visible on the hub. "Public" causes the game to be visible to all, "Private" causes it to be hidden from the hub but remain visible via pager, and "Invisible" makes the game completely invisible. The latter option is handy for test servers, where you may not want everyone to know of its existence.
• You may optionally set the priority of the game to one of three settings (Low, Medium, High). If you have more than one server, you can use this to specify which server should receive more CPU time in relation to the others.

Once you have chosen your options, you must click the "Save changes" button for the changes to be applied. You will see a positive message in the statusbar above the screen indicating that the game has been saved into the database.

My Files

The "My Files" button will bring up the file manager. From this location, you can manage all the files within your home directory.

By default, there will be no files. Your home directory will be empty. As you add games, folders will automatically be created with the same name as the game you created.

The file manager has several handy features. For instance, it is possible to create archives of folders. You can use this to easily create a backup of your precious savefiles and then download them.
Additionally the file manager can equally extract existing archives as well. Don't be frightened of uploading your savefiles anymore-- all you have to do is put them in an archive and extract it on the server.

Only the following archive formats are supported: .zip, .tar, .tgz (.tar.gz), .gz, .bz2 (.bzip2)

One thing that every game needs is it's .dmb file. Without it, the game simply cannot be run. So in order to be able to start the server for My First Game, a file called "MyFirstGame.dmb" has to be present in the "MyFirstGame" folder.

Thankfully, this has already been uploaded. All that has to be done is to run the server.

Subusers

The subuser management system is fairly straight-forward and instructions are provided on the page.

One thing to note is that if you add subusers they will have access to all of your games, so it is best to only give this priviledge to trusted people.

The server has been started!

A few things have changed now that the server has been started. For one, we can no longer change the settings. The reason we are unable to do this is because the server would have to be shut down completely to change anything, anyway, so it's best to shut it down yourself before anything is changed.

Instead of the "Start" button, we now have three buttons and a link. The link is a direct link to the server, and clicking on it will take you there. The three buttons allow you to control the server remotely.

• The Reboot button restarts the server. This is completely done internally.
• The Stop button asks the server to close gracefully. In this case, world.Del() will be called and your game will shut down as it should. If your game has frozen up, however, this button may not work.
• The Kill button is your last resort. If the game has frozen up and won't respond at all, killing it will close it immidiately with no questions asked. world.Del() will NOT be called and your game will not have time to shut down properly. Your game will be down, and fast!

One final tip

One final tip (because we can see this one coming) is that you may occassionally get errors like the one above. Suddenly, you aren't allowed to remove your .dmb file. Oh dear.

The file manager is made to be user friendly. Part of this is to prevent the user from messing up their account, and a couple of safety measures have been installed to prevent this. Part of these safety measures is that you cannot delete certain files in some cases. Notably, the following two:

• You cannot remove a games' root folder unless the game associated with it is also deleted. Example: The "MyFirstGame" folder cannot be removed, unless it removed under "My Games" first. (Note that removing a game under "My Games" will not remove its folder.)
• You cannot remove the .dmb or .rsc file, nor can you even update the .dmb or .rsc file whilst the game is running. If you want to update, you'll have to shut the game down. (Note that you can upload a new .dmb file beforehand and do a quick delete & rename to do a quick update.)

F.A.Q.

We haven't received any questions relating to the Hostserver system yet. If you've got any, feel free to e-mail info@farawayhost.com with your questions.