AMP VS Portainer

I understand this is a rather specific use case but I'm not exactly an expert this. I have an old PC that I'm converting into a AMP (https://cubecoders.com/AMP) server to host game servers as opposed to renting them from various providers. I don't know much about the concept of a DMZ server, I know it functionally runs outside of the network but not much past that. My ISP makes it difficult to port forward but there is an option to enable a DMZ which I understand allows all ports, and it appears to be simple to open and close ports in the Proxmox firewall. Which leads me to my question: Is the Proxmox firewall secure enough to run as a perimeter defense or should I look into other options? I'm also looking to expand my networking knowledge so any explanations for suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks.

Are you using a game panel, for example something like AMP (https://cubecoders.com/AMP)? That's a standard feature in AMP and if you're thinking of wanting to host other game servers in the future, it's well worth the one time $10 fee.

I recommend buying AMP by Cube Coders. You can then easily set up any server on your computer. Very cheap. I use it to run several Minecraft servers, Satisfactory, Valheim on the same PC. https://cubecoders.com/AMP

If, docker / kubernetes is not your thing, and you want an easy button, then, I recommend checking out AMP: https://cubecoders.com/AMP

I also just purchased a license started to try AMP Gamer Server Controller, and it's not too bad but I don't have much experience with it yet (will probably get more into it with A21 release soon).

Check out AMP Also don't use oracle Linux, recreate the vm with Ubuntu :)

Hi everyone. I'm planning on setting up a home server mainly for serving a dedicated gaming server using cubecoders amp (LINK) (I'll probably dedicate 4-6 cores, 16gb ram), a homeassistant server (LINK) for home automation(4 cores, 8gb ram'll be enough I think), a plex server for media consumption with my family (don't know how much cpu/ram to allocate), and a backup server(don't know what to use tbh). Also I might install, grafana and a development/build server as well for my personal projects. I might also dedicate a vm for transcoding videos to av1/h265 etc..

AMP can do this - if there's no players on, the server is put to sleep but AMP emulates enough of the Minecraft protocol to make it look like it's still online and respond to queries. When a player tries to join, they get a (configurable) message asking them to reconnect while the server starts up. - It can do this for a few other games too.

Other than that it depends on your budget, capabilities and setup choices. - Shockbyte is cheaper, but you are still paying at least 15$/month. - If you have experience with server management you can rent a Linux server it-self instead of just an ARK instance. This is cheaper and you have more control, but you also have more responsibilities. If you are going this path, I'd still recommend an UI like AMP, it makes clear what settings are possible and not + an easy entryway to other gameservers. - Which map are you going to play on? A Genesis Part 2 maps will hog more memory than a standard The Island map. If a cluster is among your choices, then calculate at least 8 GB RAM per map you are going to connect.

Portainer

> Any tips on the minimum hardware or VPS's needed to get a small swarm cluster setup?

From my testing, Docker Swarm is very lightweight, uses less memory than both Hashicorp Nomad and lightweight Kubernetes distros (like K3s). Most of the resource requirements will depend on what containers you actually want to run on the nodes.

You might build a cluster from a bunch of Raspberry Pis, some old OptiPlex boxes or laptops, or whatever you have laying around and it's mostly going to be okay. On a practical level, anything with 1-2 CPU cores and 4 GB of RAM will be okay for running any actually useful software, like a web server/reverse proxy, some databases (PostgreSQL/MySQL/MariaDB), as well as either something for a back end or some pre-packaged software, like Nextcloud.

So, even 5$/month VPSes are more than suitable, even from some of the more cheap hosts like Hetzner or Contabo (though the latter has a bad rep for limited/no support).

That said, you might also want to look at something like Portainer for a nice web based UI, for administering the cluster more easily, it really helps with discoverability and also gives you redeploy web hooks, to make CI easier: https://www.portainer.io/ (works for both Docker Swarm as well as Kubernetes, except the Kubernetes ingress control was a little bit clunky with Traefik instead of Nginx)

In this section, we will add Portainer to help us in managing our Docker containers. You can find more details about it here. To integrate Portainer into our EC2 project, we can follow these steps:

Git issues pointing to: https://docs.portainer.io/v/ce-2.9/start/install/agent/swarm/linux gives a ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS.

I am currently running Portainer, but webhooks (GitOps) appear to be broken ( [2.19.0] GitOps Updates not automatically polling from git · Issue #10309 · portainer/portainer · GitHub ) and so I cannot send webhook to redeploy a stack. So, looking for alternatives. Using this as a good excuse to learn more about docker and CI/CD etc.

A Synology NAS running Portainer (https://www.portainer.io/) running Paperless NGX (https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx)

This works better than I can possibly tell you.

I have an Epson WorkForce ES-580W that I bought when my mother passed away to bulk scan documents and it scans everything, double-sided if required, multi-page PDFs if required, at very high speed and uploads everything to OneDrive, at which point I drag and drop everything into Paperless.

I could, thinking about it, have the scanner email stuff to Paperless. Might investigate that today.

Paperless will OCR it and make it all searchable. This setup is amazing, I love living in the future.

> I've come to the conclusion (after trying kops, kubespray, kubeadm, kubeone, GKE, EKS) that if you're looking for < 100 node cluster, docker swarm should suffice. Easier to setup, maintain and upgrade.

Personally, I'd also consider throwing Portainer in there, which gives you both a nice way to interact with the cluster, as well as things like webhooks: https://www.portainer.io/

With something like Apache, Nginx, Caddy or something else acting as your "ingress" (taking care of TLS, reverse proxy, headers, rate limits, sometimes mTLS etc.) it's a surprisingly simple setup, at least for simple architectures.

casaos it just makes things like backups, offsite syncing and many other nas related things so much easier to manage. And gives you a proper nas like experience similar to that in which you'd fine on companies like tnas or synology. I actually also use it as a replacement for portainer when i don't need the more advanced features it offers

> I moved to docker swarm and love it. It's so much easier, straight forward, automatic ingress network and failover were all working out of the box. I'll stay with swarm for now.

I've had decent luck in the past with the K3s distribution, which is a bit cut down Kubernetes: https://k3s.io/

It also integrates nicely with Portainer (aside from occasional Traefik ingress weirdness sometimes), which I already use for Swarm and would suggest to anyone that wants a nice web based UI: https://www.portainer.io/

Others might also mention K0s, MicroK8s or others - there's lots of options there. But even so, I still run Docker Swarm for most of my private stuff as well and it's a breeze.

For my needs, it has just the right amount of abstractions: stacks with services that use networks and can have some storage in the form of volumes or bind mounts. Configuration in the form of environment variables and/or mounted files (or secrets), some deployment constraints and dependencies sometimes, some health checks and restart policies, as well as resource limits.

If I need a mail server, then I just have a container that binds to the ports (even low port numbers) that I need and configure it. If I need a web server, then I can just run Apache/Nginx/Caddy and use more or less 1:1 configuration files that I'd use when setting up either outside of containers, but with the added benefit of being able to refer to other apps by their service names (or aliases, if they have underscores in the names, which sometimes isn't liked).

At a certain scale, it's dead simple to use - no need for PVs and PVCs, no need for Ingress and Service abstractions, or lots and lots of templating that Helm charts would have (although those are nice in other ways).