Turn your Spare Computer Into a Gaming Server

by porkchop on Jun.24, 2009, under Gaming

The best way to recycle old PC's is to use them as a server!

Before throwing away your old computer or recycling it, you might be throwing away something valuable that can be turned into a Web server or even a gaming server! During the weekend, my friend brought me 4 Computers that were going to be thrown out by this local company in town he worked for, he asked me if I wanted them, of course I did! The computers are nothing spectacular, but they all work, minus one that needs a Hard drive, (all the computers had no hard drive since removing and destroying the hard drive is the only way to erase information on it) I had spare hard drives 40GB for the rest of the 3. The computers were all old Athlon XP’s one at 1800+ and the other 2 at 1700+, I overclocked the 1800+ from 1.53GHZ to 1.61GHZ all it could handle. I decided to take one, one of the Athlon XP 1700+ this weekend and turn it into a Counter-Strike Source gaming server and see how well it ran. I will be describing below how I turned this old garbage PC into a Counter-Strike Source server below. I actually had many people playing on the server the day I launched it, many locals from my town, and even added a few to my Steam friends list

First of all what I did was I got Ubuntu Server, which is a Linux Server that is free, at http://www.ubuntu.com/ Be sure to get the right one, they have a 32bit and 64bit version, I needed the 32bit version, it is old hardware.

I burned the Ubuntu server CD at the slowest speed I could burn it at, since the CD drives on these computers are older, and the laser is not as strong as the laser in newer computers, so to not get any errors during the install, I burned it at the slowest setting possible.

I put the CD in and booted from CD during the bios and followed all the instructions on screen to get it going, just read everything and follow the instructions on the screen, its very easy

After it all installed, It rebooted and started into a MS-DOS prompt type look alike, I put in my name and password that I had specified in the installation and logged in.

I then put in the command in this prompt after logging in:

*Note You do not need a Steam account for this and you do not need to own the game*

wget http://www.steampowered.com/download/hldsupdatetool.bin

What this does is it downloads the HLDS Update tool

Add this command to CHMOD the HLDS Update tool, so it can be opened

chmod +x hldsupdatetool.bin

Run HLDS Update tool now, this will now extract all the hldsupdatetool.bin that was downloaded earlier the command to do this is:

./hldsupdatetool.bin

The next command will run the extracted hldsupdatetool.bin and download all the files from the Internet, from the Steam server’s so make sure your Internet modem is plugged in. The way this works is the command will open the game up and insert the instructions into the console. The 1st example is for Counter-Strike Source the 2nd one is for a Half-Life 2 Death match dedicated server, I will include this since its the same steps just different text added in this command.

./steam -command update -game "Counter-Strike Source" -dir .

./steam -command update -game "hl2mp" -dir .

After entering either one of these commands you should start seeing a bunch of files appearing on the screen and percentages, don’t be alarmed, this is just the core game files being uploaded to the server, this also may take a while since there is a lot to download, so it give it some time, leave the PC for a while and come back.

Once everything is downloaded, and finished you will now run the server, this is where it can be tricky, because I wanted my server to broadcast to the Internet, not a LAN server, I wanted people to be able to join my server from the outside. What I did, this is different on all routers, I have a D-Link wireless router, is that I found out the IP that the server was running in my Logs on my router control panel and then took the IP (the IP address of the computer connecting to the router, not the outside IP) and put that IP into the DMZ zone, that my router has, what the DMZ zone does, is that it opens that computer by internal IP address to the outside Internet, take note after doing this you want all the computers you have connecting to the Internet have file sharing off, and firewall on, since you are now exposed, that is the risk of running a server.

This is the command to get the server running!

./srcds_run -console -game cstrike -port 27015 +ip 123.19.0.1 +map de_dust +maxplayers 12

In that command you want to edit the IP address to your outside IP address, go to http://whatismyip.com and put that IP address in the IP field, and you may also want to change the map, de_dust2, cs_office, de_aztec, etc are some maps, and change the maxplayers from 12 to 20. and Hit enter. The server should now run, if it doesn’t restart CNTRL ALT DELETE and retry again, since it will just keep retrying and there will be no chance of getting it to stop. Also check on your computer running steam, that the server is not in your LAN, unless you want that, this will be in the server tab.

Once your server is running you might want to run these commands or know them.

Hostname Porkchop – Entering this will change the default name of the server to Porkchop
add_bot ct – this will add bots to your server use add_bot t to add bots to the other team
bot_kick all or bot name – this will kick the bots replace all with the bot name to kick that bot
changelevel de_dust2 – this command will change the level to de_dust2

You also might want to install Mani Admin Mod, which makes all these commands a lot easier on the server, instead of having to type in all these commands, Mani Admin Mod, simplifies it with a in game menu. Here are the instructions on how to set up Mani Admin mod – http://freenerd.net/index.php?title=SRCDS_-_Mani_Admin_Mod_Setup

Well its that easy to turn that old PC into a gaming server, surprisingly after having people and friends playing on it, it did pretty well, for being such a slow machine, my next test machine will be a Pentium 4. This just shows that you can run now servers on current Internet connections, if this could handle a game server it could defiantly handle a web server, which uses a lot less bandwidth and less intensive than a gaming server. Also note that you can run any game server you want, and of course the better hardware the better the server and more players, and also the faster connection the better as well. You will need a good upload rate.