Archive
The Lab
Servers built, broken and measured. Setup guides, diagnosis write-ups and the real numbers – RAM, disk, cost – from a lab box that actually runs these games.
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Syslog Monitoring Tools Would Have Paged Me 97,819 Times for Nothing
One game server with nobody playing on it produced 131,546 log lines. 97,819 of them contain the word Warning. Exactly one line marked the moment the…
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Choosing Virtualization Software for a Game Server: 20 Containers, One VM
The game server runs in an unprivileged container rather than a virtual machine. It boots in six seconds, backs up live, and a 60 GB disk…
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A Disaster Recovery Plan Is Worth Nothing Until You Time the Restore
I restored a running game server from its archive onto a fresh container, timed every stage, and checked byte for byte that what came back was…
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What Server Backup Solutions Cost on a 60 GB Box: 97 Seconds and 6 GB
The lab box was already on the host’s weekly backup, but I had never measured one. I ran one against a live game server without stopping…
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One Syslog Server Captured 0.0255% of the Application’s Logs
I built a central syslog server, pointed a running DayZ box at it, and measured what arrived. Forwarding syslog the way every tutorial describes shipped 0.0255%…
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A 0-Byte Syslog That Was Never Written To Is a Log Management Problem
A single game server writes its logs into three unrelated places, and the system log — the one every guide tells you to collect — recorded…
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I Found My Dead Server in the Internet Archive
I migrated a forum years ago and didn’t back it up. I assumed it was gone. Most of it is — but the Internet Archive kept…
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A 2.7 GB DayZ Mod Pack Costs 270 MB of RAM. A 556 KB One Costs 24 MB.
Mod size on disk tells you almost nothing about what a mod costs your server. Four configurations measured by the same procedure on the same box…
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Your DayZ Server Is Ignoring serverDZ.cfg. Here’s the File It Actually Reads.
You edited serverDZ.cfg, restarted, and nothing changed. It isn’t a typo and it isn’t a caching problem — under LinuxGSM that file is never opened. Here’s…
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A DayZ Server Uses 4.8 GB of RAM With Nobody Playing
Measured, not estimated: what a vanilla DayZ dedicated server actually consumes on Debian 12, and the five things that broke on the way there.