Freedom server migrating to panel

**StevenNL2000** · March 29, 2022 at 10:42 AM

TL;DR: The freedom server will be moved to the panel and to a new hosting server owned by me. If you are ~~a Senior~~ an admin, send your email address to an admin officer for a panel account.

This has been a long time coming, but the freedom server is finally being migrated to the Pterodactyl panel. This will hopefully allow us to put the issues we've had with the Discord bot behind us and make the server more likely to restart by itself after a crash.

You might be wondering if there was some genius insight that suddenly made the panel move happen after all this time. The answer is: not really. It was originally supposed to happen with the 1.18 update, but the truth is that the freedom server is massive and was slowly but surely outgrowing the existing hosting server. That's why it's also being moved to a new hosting server with more space at the same time. An important detail is that the new one is not paid for by Ryan, but by me, which makes the ownership structure a little bit more straightforward.

A panel also means panel accounts. Unfortunately, there is a problem: Pterodactyl currently has absolutely no logging. That's why panel access is starting off ~~as only for Seniors and~~ without console commands (only start and stop). This is not ideal, and I am still looking for better suggestions, so please make them if you have them. Management of panel accounts will be done by the admin officers, so if you are ~~a Senior~~ an admin, please send one of them your email address so they can create an account for you. The panel will require you to enable 2FA before doing anything.

The migration will happen on March 29, 2022 at 20:00 (8 PM) UTC. It is a bit short notice, but that's only because it's actually outgrowing the existing server pretty quickly too.

Edit: If you care, here are the specifications of the new server, which is dedicated:
Hetzner AX41-NVMe
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 (6 cores, 12 threads)
RAM: 4x16GB Crucial DDR4-2666
Disk: 2x512GB Samsung NVMe SSD
Network: 1 GBit/s, unlimited traffic
Location: Helsinki, Finland

**videogamesm12** · March 29, 2022 at 10:55 AM

Thank you. Now I can rest easy knowing that the server won't run out of space or hardlock so badly that even trying to kill it forcefully doesn't work.

Luke · March 29, 2022 at 11:21 AM

why aren't we opening it to admins if it can only start stop or kill..?

**StevenNL2000** · March 29, 2022 at 11:47 AM

↩ @'phrman' That is probably going to happen, for the initial setup I just wanted to make sure that I don't give people permissions and then go "Sorry, I'm revoking that" one second later because of some weird issue.

**wild1145** · March 29, 2022 at 1:18 PM

As part of this migration the current discord bot will also be retired as it will no longer continue working. Once maintenance starts tonight we will shut down the bot.

It shouldn't be a noticeable difference for those in game other than the outage as we will switch the addressing out under the hood.

DragonSlayer2189 · March 29, 2022 at 1:31 PM

Quote

↩ @'Ryan' Once maintenance starts tonight we will shut down the bot.

I’m going to go ahead and assume that what you meant to say here is that the admin commands for the bot such as tf!ac, tf!stop, tf!start, and tf!kill will be shutdown. And that commands such as tf!list or tf!gc will still be there

Please correct me if I am wrong

uvb · March 29, 2022 at 3:18 PM

This is a massive step into the right direction imo. Thank you Steven.

Tizz · March 29, 2022 at 5:42 PM

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↩ DragonSlayer2189 And that commands such as tf!list or tf!gc will still be there

tf!gc sends command lag to telnet, conflicting with the panel's purpose = NOPE

tf!l parses JSON version of HTTPD's list page. If Ptero blocks HTTPD = NOPE

Long story short: no bot commands can be available if the resources are behind a panel. Ryan might make HTTPD work with some gimnick, in that case the only available commands would be: tf!status and tf!list

DragonSlayer2189 · March 29, 2022 at 5:55 PM

↩ Tizz why would HTTPD not work? That stuff is all part of Tfm, and unless we are removeing the punishment log, all access to log files, the schematic list, and all that, it would all still work

Telesphoreo · March 29, 2022 at 6:32 PM

↩ DragonSlayer2189 we wouldn't even need to use the httpd, pterodactyl has an API which is better to use in the first place. but yes you are correct, the httpd will still work

Tizz · March 29, 2022 at 6:41 PM

↩ DragonSlayer2189 ↩ Telesphoreo Ptero or (more likely) Docker takes over firewall rules and the sort. I don't know the technical details, just saying what Ryan has said multiple times. Basically, you can't make custom rules when playing with shared hosting systems.

**wild1145** · March 29, 2022 at 7:09 PM

↩ DragonSlayer2189 No all tf! Commands will cease to operate.

**wild1145** · March 29, 2022 at 7:11 PM

↩ Telesphoreo The issue is httpd has vulnerabilities that deadlock the server under certain conditions. The original plan was to go ahead and do some reverse proxy setup and actually stop using httpd long term entirely. The short term step is no longer really possible because of how ptero uses docker to expose ports. It's something I'm looking into and am hoping to have a better solution for but for now it's going to simply be re enabled as it was at risk.

**wild1145** · March 29, 2022 at 8:42 PM

For those not aware, maintenance has started.

Telesphoreo · March 29, 2022 at 8:46 PM

↩ @'Ryan' you can use the pterodactyl API though. using httpd in the first place wasn't that great of an idea

**wild1145** · March 29, 2022 at 8:49 PM

↩ Telesphoreo Doesn't matter. Community have said discord bots pose a risk to the server security, so we won't be having any going forward to appease those concerns.

Telesphoreo · March 29, 2022 at 9:08 PM

↩ @'Ryan' Who??

**wild1145** · March 29, 2022 at 9:09 PM

↩ Telesphoreo Various folks on nearly every thread about the panel. The entire point of getting a panel is to remove discord bots permanently from having any interaction with the server, so that's what we're doing.

Telesphoreo · March 29, 2022 at 9:21 PM

↩ @'Ryan' I'm still not clear who's saying this or how having a Discord bot is a security risk (one that would theoretically interact with Pterodactyl's API)

**wild1145** · March 29, 2022 at 9:24 PM

↩ Telesphoreo I think the logic was if someone's Discord account could be hacked, and as a result would let them use the bot. Again it was a consistent argument that "Discord bots are bad and insecure, get a panel"

In any case, we're not going to support bots going forward, we have a panel and we've decommissioned the server that hosted the bots. It's a waste of developer effort to do custom integration, if we wanted something custom and the community had waited, we'd have written a custom panel to meet our actual requirements instead of a subset of them.