Minecraft Server Administration + Troubleshooting Home Servers

Okay, so I lied - I haven't started programming yet. Though I can feel my annual two-week Minecraft phase creeping up and the same seems to be true for some of my friends on Discord. We previously played in 2023 but haven't played since. Interest is coming back, so I've started to prepare a server in advance.

The Setup

I have a little home server running on an Intel NUC that hosts everything I need in Virtual Machines (VMs). On my VMS, I have:

• OpenMediaVault (Serves as my centralised data storage)
• Docker (Lots of smaller containers that run this very blog that you're reading, automation stuff for downloading and managing Movies and TV Shows)
• Plex (What lets me stream those Movies and TV Shows; basically my personal Netflix)
• Pterodactyl (A fancy Game Server hosting solution. It's both a control panel, and it automates running the servers)

In total, that Intel NUC has some kind of 10th Gen i5, 32GB of DDR4 RAM, and a 2TB M.2 SSD. It works very nicely for my needs and it sips power with everything running at once - I've never once run into issues with it. Until now.

The Servers

Everything runs on Pterodactyl (https://pterodactyl.io). You need a bit of basic Linux knowledge to set it up all up but once you do, it's wonderful. It's easy to use, easy to update, very versatile, scalable, and has a wide range of support for different types of game servers. Not to mention, using the whole thing makes you feel professional. What's not to love? Well, that would be all the errors that I've been running into. Up until now, it's run flawlessly and the issues I'm facing aren't inherently Pterodactyl's fault. But let's set that aside for now and come back to this later.

For the servers running on Pterodactyl, I already had a different Minecraft server running persistently that my other group of friends play. While I did consider inviting the first group of friends onto the same server and not having to spread out computing resources, I thought I'd instead create a dedicated resource for each friendship group so that the experience each group has is to their own world and they don't have to interfere with each other. And while I'm sure either group wouldn't steal or grief each other's bases, I thought it best to not run that risk. While I could've kept to the same server and used a plugin to host multiple world files, it didn't seem like the best user experience if I asked one group of friends to manually select a world each time they logged. Not to mention, my existing server runs Fabric as I have a few friends who insist on Vanilla mechanics being available and don't like Paper or another Bukkit-derived server, whereas the newer group doesn't care, so I opted for Paper-based instead.

So what does this mean? I need a separate server for the new friend group as I'd rather run it on Paper, while the existing server runs on Fabric. The solution is to use Velocity, which is an internal Minecraft server network/proxy. All inbound traffic and connecting players connect to a master proxy server (Velocity itself), which then directs the player traffic and data to the server we actually want them to connect to. Velocity itself doesn't host a Minecraft world, but just routes the traffic; it's a middle man.

"But why do you need Velocity? Just run both servers independently and give each group their own IPs to connect - this seems unnecessary."
And you're probably right. I picked Velocity because I wanted to try it out, but also because I wanted to have one single IP that every single friend from either group could connect to. In this case, that IP is mc.noemptyglass.com. It's clean, it's elegant, and most importantly, using Velocity means I can have a fallback server which is a server that players can be re-routed to in case the server they originally wanted to connect to isn't available for some reason, like it crashing or me taking it offline to do maintenance.

Velocity is created by the same team as PaperMC and integrates natively with Paper, but it also works with Fabric-based servers (like my original server), Forge-based servers, and so on. It's a wonderfully scalable solution that supports multiple different Minecraft versions, which means any future servers I want or need to set up simply let Velocity hook into it and direct traffic that way.

The Configuration

Velocity is very easy to set up and the documentation makes it a breeze. My setup means that I run four servers:

1. The Velocity proxy server itself that accepts all incoming traffic
2. The original Fabric-based server for Friend Group 1 (Whitelisted)
3. The new, Paper-based server for Friend Group 2 that spun off this whole affair
4. A fallback server, where players are sent to if either server is unavailable for some reason.

After initially configuring Velocity and hooking other servers into it, everything runs seamlessly and smoothly. I connected to each server, running different scenarios such as if I'm not whitelisted for the first sever, if the second server goes offline while I'm connected, if none of the servers are available, and so on. Generally, it's a breeze and smooth.

The Problems

So remember those issues I was facing earlier? My problem is not with the Minecraft servers or Velocity or anything else - it's Pterodactyl. Or, well, it's Pterodactyl running on my physical home server.

In the midst of configuring plugins for my new Paper server, I started to get a whole lot of 'Too Many Requests' errors when viewing the Pterodactyl Panel on my browser, which means I couldn't actually connect and manage my servers. I then had a look at the resource usage for my Pterodactly VM (Virtual Machine) instance on my physical Home Server and saw it was massively spiking, so the VM was probably getting overwhelmed by something eating up the resources. What's causing it? I have absolutely no idea.

Ugggghhhhhh.

10:46 pm, 2nd March 2025
At the moment, I'm trying to spin each VM back up one at a time so everything doesn't get hit at once. Each VM is running absolutely fine and barely using any resources, though Pterodactyl's VM is using up a lot of resources straight away and choking. Even more irritably, I can't tell why - everything started when I tried to open one of my Minecraft server panels in Pterodactyl and the webpage was no longer responsive all of a sudden due to requests being out of date.

I can still use SSH to access my Pterodactyl VM from the inside, so it's not completely locked up. Using htop, a handy command in the Terminal inside Linux, you can see resource usage - it's like a command line Task Manager and has bonus points for making you look like #hackerman if anyone is peering over your shoulder to see what you're doing.

So what the hell is going on? In all honesty, I don't know. It's late, I've spent all day on this, and I probably have tunnel vision from working on nothing but this.

The strange thing is that I can see the admin side of running Pterodactly, i.e. these screens:

In this section of Pterodactyl, owners of the whole instance of Pterodactyl can set up and create servers, change their build configuration like adding/removing RAM, Disk space, and other handy things. This is separate to the Admin view for an individual game server where the owner of that individual server can start/stop the server, upload files, etc.

Because I can still navigate this and access my Pterodactyl VM via SSH, the VM itself is fine. However, going to the individual servers is impossible as Pterodactyl seems to be getting too many requests:

11:40 pm
Problem solved - ChatGPT is the best. It's like having an infinitely knowledgeable friend that is patient, detailed, and responsive. It suggested multiple things, such as adding TRUSTED_PROXIES=* to Pterodactyl's core .env config, as well as clearing PHP's cache and restarting.

In all honesty, it's probably clearing the cache that did this and it's what I tried to do earlier by restarting Pterodactyl's Wings module.

ChatGPT seems like the ultimate solution to most problems, with its vast training data wide across the internet and its ability to dynamically adapt to your problem by contextually recognising and remembering what you've previously said - gone are the days of Googling and scouring 12-year old forum posts. Even though I perfectly remember what life was like before ChatGPT and knowing how to Google, it seems near impossible to live without it now.