So I’ve been playing Icarus with the wife and the optimization is hot garbage. Wife is hosting and pulling 10 fps with a Nvidia 3070TI
We enjoy the game so I start doing research. Turns out once you’ve played enough the database on the host just gets too big and chokes out the CPU threads since it can’t use more than 2 cores.
Answer is to migrate your world to a sepf hosted dedicated server. Say no more.
So now I got an excuse (wife approved) to setup a computer as a server and keep it running. I have an old HP SFF i5 16GB RAM with an SSD I’ve reimagined a few times for a home server.
Flashed it with Debian and setup the Icarus server in docker. Runs like a champ.
Bonus points. I hooked up a wattage meter and it idles at 1~2 watts!
I used to run an old gaming computer as a home server and it felt like $30 a month in electricity.
Now I can start throwing more stuff on there once I figure out backup for the game world incase I bork it.
Have you thought about running proxmox rather than Debian? I found it to be useful for managing/tracking/backups of containers.
It’s worth noting that Proxmox uses Debian. It’s essentially a collection of Debian packages, and you can install Proxmox on top of an existing Debian system: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Install_Proxmox_VE_on_Debian_13_Trixie
Proxmox lacks a Docker UI though, which is annoying. One of the reasons I’m using Unraid at home is because it supports KVM, LXC, and Docker, all in the same UI. (LXC is a plugin rather than being available out-of-the-box, but it works very well)
(and no, Proxmox’s new OCI container support isn’t it - that just converts the container to LXC and doesn’t handle upgrades)
Proxmox with community scripts LXCs is crazy
I tried Proxmox but found it way overkill for home use. I run ~50 Docker containers and I love Docker for its ease of use. Proxmox is an order of magnitude more complicated.
50 containers…
I hope I don’t go that crazy.
I’d need a WebUI at that point I can monitor from a Workstation.
I was probably exaggerating when I said 50.
I just counted the icons on my dash. 42.
How do you manage backups? One big benefit of Proxmox is running containers in vms and easily snapshot/backup/restore whole vms.
“Backups?”
Yes. It’s just a higher level of efficiency, portability, snapshots and backups.
Hehe tbh I only run 5 😅 I found it useful when I had to diagnose some cpu hogging off one of the containers and the ease of backups. Even though have not needed it yet.
I eventually intend to start some funny stuff I wanted a full OS for.
If I shift my end goal to run in a container then that would make more sense.
I initially went for Debian because I had a deadline for us to get back to gaming together.
I’ve seen loads of people use proxmax. As a windows admin I wanted a OS as a stepping stone.
I run Brazzite on my gaming rig and mint on my daily driver laptop now. Getting there.
Totally fair. I also started with Debian for a Minecraft server, at the request of my partner. I might try out Icarus, is it cross platform?
If you want a webui for the debian server that gives you logs, services, ssh terminal and more then I can recommend checking out Cockpit
https://cockpit-project.org/
If you decide you want to you can install KVM/Qemu on the debian host to get into full virtualization that way. The webui can be used to configure and manage the VMs too with https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit-machines
edit: Cockpit also has a Docker manager, though I feel it isn’t full featured yet. I mostly used it to stop and start dockers from my phone.
https://github.com/chrisjbawden/cockpit-dockermanager
Honestly I left proxmox/virtualization OSes a while back for simple RHEL. I have Docker for most everything and the few things I need full virt for the features Cockpit provides are more than enough. If I ever get back into clustering I’ll look at proxmox again.