Minecraft

Introduction

We are to have some Minecraft servers on the Home Lab'. The general setup will be to have a Velocity server in front several Minecraft host Virtual Machines. Velocity works in a similar way to a Nginx reverse proxy whereby Pfsense forwards all Minecraft traffic to the Velocity server including the SNI and Velocity redirects traffic to the required hostname based on the DNS name. Cloudflare does not reverse proxy Minecraft traffic on the free tier and as we do not want to have to deal with random bots from the east so we will not leave the port open on the edge or Pfsense to random bots with port scanners. So we will use grey cloud at Cloudflare but DNS will point to a service like TCPShield and our firewalls only accept Minecraft traffic from their IP addresses and Velocity will only accept named servers and drop any unknown DNS names.

Installation

The installation will be in some distinct stages to enable each step to be proved to be working before proceeding to the next stage. First we setup a simple vanilla Minecraft server and set the firewall to port forward to it directly. Once that is proven to be working we will setup a Velocity server that will receive all 25565 traffic and forward it to the working Minecraft host. The next phase after the first host is getting traffic forwarded is to setup a second host and make sure velocity can forward to each, included in this step will be hardening the Velocity server with whatever security measures that it has available. When we are sure that Velocity is working properly we can work on the remote access stage, where we use TCPShield to proxy the service and have Cloudflare DNS only names setup with cherry.seaoffate.net and apple.seaoffate.net etc. From this point forward any new Minecraft servers will simply follow the same setup procedure.

The First Minecraft Host

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Item	Value
CPU	2
RAM	4GB
Lexar Swap	16gb
Storage	96GB
Base OS	Debian 13.3
Hostname	Cherry
IP Address	192.168.100.30