This started as a reply to a post in the latest
"PocketMine doesn’t start (mineos-node) thread
(PocketMine doesn’t start (mineos-node)),
but quickly ended up a rant. I’ll start a new thread for it instead 
I am actually running two MCPE servers, and several MCPC
servers, just fine in MineOS. MineOS’s support of MCPE works, you just need to
manually keep up with the different bleeding edge releases to keep up with
Mojang, which also means keeping an eye on the different PHP-releases to make
sure it matches your selected phar-version. Imagicalmine, I think, for the
newer releases (since the last two or three weeks) have switched over to PHP7,
at least that version is the one they are developing the most right now. They
also (weirdly) threw out all of their earlier versions at the same time, so
what they are doing I do not know. Pocketmine still live, and respond, in their
forums. They have not, however, managed to get their Jenkins-page available
online again. This means you have to search their forums each time you want an
upgrade, which I find a tedious task at best.
I will actually go as far as to say that since MineOS,
Pocketmine, and Imagicalmine is developed for free on somebody’s spare time,
they are doing a fab job. Free spare time development does however have the
drawback that consistency is at times spotty (just read the comment on the
Imagicalmines Jenkins releases). Hexparrot and MineOS is very consistent, and
he is very active in responding and keeping the MineOs community living and
thriving. Thank you very much Hexparrot He cannot, however, base his
released profiles on something that has to be searched through forums to find,
or on something that the developers may just remove because they felt like it.
He also cannot base his profiles on bleeding edges that may or may not work
(even though he actually in a way did this with MCPE to be able to offer
something that may work anyway). Mineos is built in such a way that if you can
make something run standalone, you can make it run in Mineos. It may take some
tinkering and work, but it is possible. The support is there and working.
Hexparrot does monitor the forums, and are (as far as I have seen) happy to
discuss requests for change or additions to improve support and features. He
does try to help out when he can when we run into problems, even with things we
ought to know (I’ve had a few head slaps after being told something obvious I
should have known, Sorry about that Hexparrot). In return he expects us to do a
bit of legwork ourselves to at least try to sort out problems that are not the
fault of MineOS. At times I even do so using the MineOS forums as a log of my
work, both to get tips and feedback to help me solve what I am struggling with,
and to have it documented somewhere where other MineOS admins can take advantage
of my experiences (be it good or bad).
As a conclusion I’ll post a list of what I feel is a minimum
you need to be a successful Minecraft admin:
-
you need to have at least a fundamental knowledge of *nix
(unix, linux, ubuntu, or you other chosen distro), OR be able to google basic
*nix shell commands. You need to get your hands dirty, you need to go into a
shell and type things. Only relying on the MineOS web view will quickly ruin
both you and your Minecraft users fun -
you need to like tinkering. No matter how you run your Minecraft
server, it never runs smoothly, and never on your first try. Even the official
vanilla servers have their own peculiarities (I lost over three months of
minecrafting for one of my servers (and got a bunch of very angry players) when
Mojang accidentally disabled auto saving for a while, and the server
crashed…). Want Bukkit? things must be compiled and assembled (Hexparrot has
done this more or less done in web-view now, but even here you need to tinker
to find a working version), added bukkit plugins? More tinkering. pocketmine?
Bring out your *nix gold smith toolset. You’ll need 'em. Want to try something
not in the MineOS profil list yet? MineOs supports it, but you have to tinker
it in. Grab your tool set and start tinkering. -
You do not need to like Minecraft (but it helps), but you
need to play it. You need to be in there with you users, see the bugs they are
plagued with. They probably won’t be able to tell you what happened, you need
to see it for yourself. -
Learn where the logs are hidden, and how to read them.
They are your best friends.