My best experience admining a server was right after Eternal Silence was released on Steam, we setup I think 5 servers during the course of a week because they were slam packed full 100% of the time. We started out with 2 and over the course of the week we kept adding more to keep up with the demand. It was awesome to be able to have so many people wanting to play the game and just throwing more logs on the fire to keep them all happy.
The worst experiences are dealing with people who think that they can do/say whatever they want because they own the game. They sass admins and talk back and think they're allowed to do whatever they want. Me personally, I don't care if anyone talks trash to me or whatever, but when people do it to my other admins or community members I hand out punishment. It sucks to have to remind people daily, "Hey, my server, my rules, if you don't like it there are 3,000 other ones to play on," but it's part of the job I guess. Keeping griefers and hackers at bay is a matter of having active members who give a shit. I've found that a zero tolerance policy is best because there's no reason you need to cut people like that any slack. Again, there's ~3,000 TF2 servers at any given point in time, they can go piss people off elsewhere. Actual security is easy - don't give out passwords to anyone. Ever, period. There's no reason anyone should need your FTP pass, and nobody needs your rcon if you have something like SourceMod setup where people can issue rcon commands using that instead. On Thu, 2009-04-16 at 08:47 -0400, Bruce Potter wrote: > [posted this to the linux list a few days ago. figured I'd post it > here too. Apologize for the x-post] > > Howdy all, > I'm giving a talk at a conference this weekend on game servers. > Basically focusing on the technology behind them, how to secure them > (both from cheaters/griefers and from actual dedicated attackers), > the culture around running servers, and whatever else I have time to > cover. > > http://www.notacon.org/speakers.html#Potter > > has more info on it. > > Anyhoo, I was wondering if any of the folks on this list had any best > of/worst of stories, quotes, or feelings they'd like to share. If so, > feel free to send me details off list... cuz I'd hate to negatively > impact the signal to noise ratio on this list ;) > > I also hope to be doing a deeper dive into the security aspect of > game servers at the Blackhat conference in Vegas later this year, > FYI, in case folks are interested. > > thanks > > bruce > > > _______________________________________________ > To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please > visit: > http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlds _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlds
