As you might have realized, the new temp server crashed every couple of days. The old main server was automatically restarted to cater to the old “have you tried to switch it on and off again”-solution, but this did not seem to help for the temp server. Something between the new server version and the new operating system did not seem to fit well.

We are using a software called “screen” to be able to run the server on linux in the background (instead of having permanently a computer connected to it), linux servers do not have physical screens for that matter, and therefore do not run java programs like the linux server in the background by default. Imagine you wanted to start a game but not have a window open for it on your computer. But you want to be able to open a window and re-connect to the game running in the background somewhere, like a printer driver etc. That program seems to have issues now, and there is a new one (called tmux) that I just learned about when talking to the support channel on discord for the server version we are using.

So I migrated our start/stop/backup script to tmux and we will see if we still see crashes in the coming days. Let’s hope this issue is fixed now.