Jan "Jenkings" Škoda - blog

As the project is growing more and more, it is more and more necessary to have semi-public testing environment. Especially with the multiplayer games it is not possible to test them in local environment.

I have a free VPS with enough hardware to do something like this, but it is currently unused. It is hosted in the ORACLE data centre in Frankfurt. I remember the difficulties, because I have set up my personal website on this kind of VPS. There are a lot of firewall layers and I am not really into networking. However, I had some time so I decided to do some research and try to run the test environment to be able to offer better, tested services.

I spent five hours getting the web server, mariadb and PHP up and running, setting up symlinked deployment so that I could later create an automated deployment system, and getting the web up and running. After those 5 hours I had a working website with working database connections.

However, the next step is still in progress. It is getting the game server up and running, which is also the most difficult part.

I have managed to set up all the certificates to set up the secure WSS connections, the servers seem to be running, the ports are open, or at least when I ask the operating system, but I am unable to connect to these servers.

I am using almost exactly the same setup as in production, so I guess the problem is not really in my code, but in some environment/OS/network setup.

I have already spent about 12 hours configuring the whole server and I am still not done. Now I think I need to take a few days off to calm down and come up with new ideas on how to proceed.