Pitboss Redundancy Discussion

[scooter]

Well ideally there would be two people. One on the German forum to set up our games and then one person on our forum to set up theirs.

Yeah but to be clear, that decision is 100% up to Zulan because they are his servers, and in the past he did not want to do this. There's a > 0% chance he decides not to do this, and we will be unable to launch any new games on his server.

When we talk about redundancy, that must include the scenario that we lose access to Zulans server, for any reason. We should also plan to offer these resources to the German community in the same way that they have shared with us.

We need:

• Two servers capable of hosting a dozen large PB games simultaneously (let's plan for the worst)
  
  
• Two admins capable of accessing both server (do we need this, or just two admins, each with access to one server?)
  
  
• All of the same functionality of how to use the open source tools (and have them set up on the back up server, so run a test set up and see where that goes?)
  
  
• Access to the relevant save files (essentially, what if the server goes down hard and can't be brought back up? If we can log into each game, then we can simply take a save and rehost).

Thinking this through, do we need DDNS set up for the second server? Everything else seems like it is just set up on the relevant machine. I'm in the process of setting up a home lab so I may be in a position to be a backup host, but I'd probably be using a VM to host, and I'm already out of my depth simply writing this sentence.

Yeah, what would be great is if we had a default permanent hosted server with the ability to fallback on someone's home setup if things change. This ordeal has me somewhat tempted to go ahead and expand my home setup. I already have a small server rack with a bunch of various minor things for home use, but no actual server in it. Sort of tempting to fish through local sales and see if I can find someone dumping one for cheap and get it configured. I wouldn't think running the PB server would need much hardware oomph. But getting that done is a matter of weeks/months, not days for me, and it would probably not be an ideal Plan A for Pitboss games. It would probably work though.


DDNS is pretty easy. DuckDNS is free and a popular solution for it these days. The actual mechanics of setting up a Civ4 PB, mixing in mods, and configuring it properly would all be new for just about anyone, so that may be a real barrier too.

[Krill]

Yeah, what would be great is if we had a default permanent hosted server with the ability to fallback on someone's home setup if things change. This ordeal has me somewhat tempted to go ahead and expand my home setup. I already have a small server rack with a bunch of various minor things for home use, but no actual server in it. Sort of tempting to fish through local sales and see if I can find someone dumping one for cheap and get it configured. I wouldn't think running the PB server would need much hardware oomph. But getting that done is a matter of weeks/months, not days for me, and it would probably not be an ideal Plan A for Pitboss games. It would probably work though.


DDNS is pretty easy. DuckDNS is free and a popular solution for it these days. The actual mechanics of setting up a Civ4 PB, mixing in mods, and configuring it properly would all be new for just about anyone, so that may be a real barrier too.

Let's be fair, Civ 4 is 19 years old and the pitboss application wasn't taxing back then. I can't imagine any vaguely decent in 2024 home lab server equipment which is 8 years old is going to struggle if all it has to do is run 12 PB instances, but a home network which is running multiple 4K streams might be a larger bottleneck.

Assuming that we have the hardware sorted, does anyone know if we need to run pitboss in windows or can we run it in linux ie Debian?

[scooter]

Yeah, pretty much any remotely recent hardware will work effortlessly. I've heard of people running Pitboss on truly ancient hardware. I literally was thinking of finding some lousy old tower PC someone is dumping for $20 and repurposing it.


It does require Windows, though, as you do have to have the full game installed. It's possible someone has made it work in Linux, but I'm not aware of anyone doing it.

[Krill]

It runs on Proton but is that only the base game, not the PB client?

[scooter]

It runs on Proton but is that only the base game, not the PB client?

Yeah I really don't know for sure as so very few people have even attempted to run the PB client, so there's not exactly many people who have tried recently. I would be somewhat surprised if it worked on Linux with no issues, mostly because it's not just the client - it's the various mods and PBSpy integrations too. But only one real way to find out if you're feeling adventurous.

[Krill]

Well I can stop that right there: I am not adventurous

I didn't really want to run a Windows VM but I'll probably have a go. It would fit in with other plans I have, but it will take me a while to get around to it later in May...

[RefSteel]

Yeah, pretty much any remotely recent hardware will work effortlessly. I've heard of people running Pitboss on truly ancient hardware. I literally was thinking of finding some lousy old tower PC someone is dumping for $20 and repurposing it.


It does require Windows, though, as you do have to have the full game installed. It's possible someone has made it work in Linux, but I'm not aware of anyone doing it.

I'm running the game in Linux Mint, using Wine - it's a full installation in the sense of "exactly the same installation I originally ran on my old XP machine, just moving all the files and folders over as-is." I haven't tried to host a Pitboss with it but don't know of anything that would prevent a Linux user from doing so. For what it's worth!

[EDIT: Here is where Ramk walked me through how to set it up so it would work. Later in that same thread (and maybe earlier too) he also provided some tech support to someone trying to set up a Pitboss server, which might be helpful too.]

[Krill]

Ref, would you be willing to host a test PB then? Not long term, just for a week to check for stability? Maybe we could even pull one of the saves from a previous game that recently finished to see how it handles late game.

[RefSteel]

Ref, would you be willing to host a test PB then? Not long term, just for a week to check for stability? Maybe we could even pull one of the saves from a previous game that recently finished to see how it handles late game.

I could try to host a test game for a short time as a proof of concept, sure, but I don't think my internet connection and aging laptop can provide even a full week of continuous uptime.

[Krill]

I think we need to know that the PB client is stable enough to work for us on Mint, but the first step is to know if it even works. If that is the case, even a short test to confirm it loads and people can connect is worth doing?