Hacked Development

Thanks to my friends over at Fast Wireless Internet, I now have my own ISP grade wireless equipment. I will be using this (hopefully) to build a wireless link from my house in Dublin, to my parents (and my mates) house in Laois. this is a wireless link of over 50km so proper preparation is paramount. The main idea is to have two directional antennae on each site, one for TX and one for RX, coupled with this will be a standard (high gain) omni-directional for spread coverage of the surrounding area.

The main equipment that is going to be used is RouterBoards running the Micro-Tik (Linux based) operating system, 5.8Ghz Wireless cards and some high gain, narrow beam (~7°) dish style antennae. The house in Dublin will have an extended mounting post fixed to the roof, while the house in Laois already has access to a nice big shiny mast (and a wind turbine)

I’m also in the middle of working on some security features for this, y’know wireless isn’t all that secure… so I will be using MAC filtering, WPA2, Radius and possibly passive IDS & Network monitoring. The Micro-Tik will take care of the first two, but I’ll be implementing a PFSense system on a PC Engines Wrap.1D too.

In order to house all of this equipment, I will be building a small(ish) NOC or Network Operations Centre in my attic, an more than likely my mate will just add the new equipment to the NOC thats already on his end. As a part of this NOC build, I will be making (meh, repairing) a 12V UPS and fitting it with some high AH batteries, moving my mini-itx to it, and building a custom P0E power distribution system.

All in all, its going to be a big, interesting project… I’ll keep you posted!

Ok, so from the last section of this you should have a working Counter-Strike:Source server up and running, just to make this a little bit easier on the admins, now we’re going to install Mani Admin Plugin. The first thing your going to need is Mani Admin Plugin it’s self…

# wget http://www.mani-admin-plugin.com/mani_admin_plugin/v1_2_beta_s/mani_admin_plugin_v1_2_beta_s.zip
# unzip mani_admin_plugin_v1_2_beta_s.zip

Once that’s done, you can move the files from the newly extracted directory to your ./<server>/cstrike directory as follows

# mv -R addons /<yourserver>/cstrike
# mv -R cfg/<yourserver>/cstrike
# mv -R materials/<yourserver>/cstrike
# mv -R sound /<yourserver>/cstrike

The next step is to add “exec mani_server.cfg” into your own server.cfg

# echo “exec mani_server.cfg >> /yourserver/cstrike/cfg/server.cfg”

Finally, we need to get mani running as an addon each time your server starts, the best way to do this is to create a mani_admin_plugin.vdf in /yourserver/cstrike/addons and add the following text to it.

“Plugin”
{
“file” “../cstrike/addons/mani_admin_plugin”
}

Mani should now be installed and running, the final steps is to add yourself to the /yourserver/cstrike/cfg/mani_admin_plugin/clients.txt file, this however I will not cover. All of the information on how to do this, in various different ways is available here.

Just so you know, I am currently working on a script that will allow for the automatic installation of ANY of the linux based Steam game servers just by answering a few questions. I’ll keep you posted on my progress with this.

*** UPDATE: Fixed some typo’s in the commands ***

This is how to set up a CS:S server on Ubuntu Linux. This is not a definitive guide, it is simply how I have done it. I have omitted some security precautions here as my server will not be going live online, and is only used for testing things in-house.

NOTE: lines of text preceded with a # symbol should be entered into a terminal.

First of all, you are going to need the HLDS tool from Steam, this is what allows us to get all of the required game files and update the server etc…

# wget http://www.steampowered.com/download/hldsupdatetool.bin
# chmod +x hldsupdatetool.bin
# ./hldsupdatetool.bin
# ./steam

This will download the hlds tool, make it executable, extract the steam tool, and update the steam tool. We now have everything required to get ready to install. The next step is to create somewhere for the server to go, and get all of the required files.

# mkdir CSS1
# ./steam -command update -game “Counter-Strike Source” -dir ./CSS1

This will begin the download of your new CS:S server, this can take some time and varies greatly depending on your download speed. At this point, you can consider what addons and configuration you want to use on your server, a handy tool I came across for the configuration files is available here. Once your CS:S server has finished installing, you can launch it by doing the following…

# cd CSS1
# ./srcds_run -console -game cstrike +map cs_office +maxplayers 16 -tickrate 66 -autoupdate -ip 192.168.0.100

The above command assumes the following, you want to play cs_office with the possibility of hosting 16 players on a 66 tick server who’s IP is 192.168.0.100, adjust these values to suit your own requirements.

Congratulations, you should now have a working CS:S server, but its not much fun without some plugins, so we’re gonna grab and configure Mani Admin Plugin and Eventscripts to throw on there for some easy administration and fun games. This will be continued in part 2.