Left 4 Dead (A SickPillz hosting adventure)

Hosting Valve games is always fun due to Valve insistance on making every possible aspect of their games customizable. I recently purchased Left 4 Dead and decided to setup a dedicated host. And this time I did it on my Linux Box…….

This is a post of how I did it and what I think of it.

First, I found a great article on how to install srcds (The Source dedicated server) on Left 4 Dead Forums (site). This has an excellent guide which made installation quick and painless. I could have figured it out myself but I didn’t want to waste time, I wanted to get my game on! The one issue I have with their tutorial was the severely limited server.cfg file which did not include logging and I really wanted to have logging enabled so I can review the text chats to help identify any issues (lag, bad map etc) or recommendations for improvement. So I did a search for a sample server.cfg files and found a site called Down to the Last Save (site) which had a config file that was set up to log, however I have yet to get the server to log anything…. here is a sample of my file if anyone knows what I am doing wrong I would appreciate it.

Sample server.cfg

hostname SickPillz L4D Server
// Rcon Cvars
rcon_password “my recon password” //Set’s remote control password
// Server Cvars
mp_disable_autokick 1 //Prevents a userid from being auto-kicked
sv_allow_color_correction 0 //Allow or disallow clients to use color correction on this server.
sv_allow_wait_command 0 //Allow or disallow the wait command on clients connected to this server.
sv_alltalk 0 //Players can hear all other players, no team restrictions
sv_alternateticks 0 //If set, server only simulates entities on even numbered ticks.
sv_clearhinthistory 0 //Clear memory of server side hints displayed to the player.
sv_consistency 1 //Whether the server enforces file consistency for critical files
sv_contact “your_admin@whatever.com” //Contact email for server sysop
sv_downloadurl “” //Location from which clients can download missing files

// Lan or internet play, Server region cvars
//sv_lan 0 //Server is a lan server ( no heartbeat, no authentication, no non-class C addresses )
sv_region 255 // Region Codes: 1 – US East coast, 1 – US West coast, 2 – South America, 3 – Europe, 4 – Asia, 5 – Australia, 6 – Middle East, 7 – Africa, 255 – world

// Server Logging
sv_log_onefile 0 //Log server information to only one file.
sv_logbans 1 //Log server bans in the server logs.
sv_logecho 0 //Echo log information to the console.
sv_logfile 1 //Log server information in the log file.
sv_logflush 0 //Flush the log file to disk on each write (slow).
sv_logsdir “/home/”username”/hlds/l4d/logs/” //Folder in the game directory where server logs will be stored.

//Server Rates
sv_maxcmdrate 100 //(If sv_mincmdrate is > 0), this sets the maximum value for cl_cmdrate.
sv_unlag 1
sv_maxunlag .5
//Fix to get your server onto the master lists
setmaster add 68.142.72.250:27011
setmaster add 72.165.61.189:27011
sv_steamgroup ******//this is your group’s steam group id.. allows members to join from main menu add
//sv_steamgroup_exclusive 1 //to make it exclusive and private
z_difficulty “Normal” “//this is the difficulty setting

I am currently piping the verbose output of the terminal running srcds into a logfile until I can configure the server to properly log.

So far I have kept the server running and played on it several times. I haven’t had any major lag issues or crashes. I am hosting it using a Time Warner Roadrunner Cable Modem connection and Ubuntu Linux 64bit on a core2duo with 4gigs or memory. I have been tracking the resources used and I have to say that it is a lot less resource intensive than I thought it would be.

I’ll keep you posted as things progress.

I recently came back from a trip for work only to find that my server was listing this….
“Your server needs to be restarted in order to receive the latest update.
Your server needs to be restarted in order to receive the latest update.”

Well I had assumed that it needed a server update as my windows Steam client had updated Left 4 Dead when I began to launch it. So I had to update the server by issuing the following command:
“./steam -command update -game l4d_full -dir .”
in the hlds directory and after a short update my server was back up again.

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