OGCraft
I've been interested in Minecraft ever since I was little and it was released, so it's only natural that my first major project included it. When I was 15 I helped found a multiplayer game host, which is now known as OGCraft. We started out as just a few friends with a dream and we're now an experienced non profit organization that services several hundred players. We're completely funded by donations and all of our staff are volunteers. We've worked meticulously to foster an inclusive and inviting environment.
I've learned many things while running this passion project over the past 4 years. I've had to learn the basics of essentially all aspects of network engineering to run this Minecraft server. We've had everything from malicious targeted hacks on staff various accounts, to multi server management and networking between them, to team management. I'll break it all down in the following sections.
We faced many hardships with our hosting from early on. We formed our server after splitting off of another due to a difference in opinion on several matters. We received a lot of hate from this and that led to people attacking us.
We had our server misconfigured in a way that allowed people to bypass Mojang's authentication servers and this allowed people to log in with accounts that weren't theirs. On December 10th 2021 after being up for less than 6 months this exact thing happened with a staff account. They logged on and decimated the server in ways that weren't reversable. We hadn't been running regular backups so we had to start from scratch again.
We wanted to make completely sure that this would never happen again so we corrected our configuration error and added two factor auth whenever any staff member logs on. We've had accounts compromised two other times but the two factor authentication stopped them in their tracks.
Learning from these experiences has sparked an interest in cybersecurity and pushed me to pursue a degree in computer science.
Running this server has also given me an intro to network design and engineering. I've managed up to five interconnected servers at once. It's simpler with Minecraft than it is with other servers but it still gives me experience.
We have each individual server running and then a small "proxy" server that handles the requests between them. We don't use this setup anymore due to the high cost of it, however it is something we're looking at bringing back on a smaller scale.
We're currently looking at expanding our network to include 2-3 more servers and connecting them via these links.
The most important part of all of this has been the community I've help foster from it. We have some of the best and most accepting members of our community that I've met in any online community. I've made several lifelong friends from this passion project and made memories that will stick with me for a lifetime. I want to specifically call out in no particular order Sam, Stud, Swanky, Spike, Annei, Elliott, Flash, Nix, Dorrito, Shadow, Croc, Rank, and Derryl for your time you have and will spend making the server a better place. We couldn't have done all of this without you. Thank You.
I want to give particular thanks to my co-founders and friends Sam and Stud. You two are some of the best most caring people I've ever met. There's no one I'd rather run this server with.
All of the pictures and builds from these pictures have been done by our players and staff members on the server over the years.
