In the last few days a friend turned me on to www.digitalocean.com who is selling very simple VS (Virtual Servers) for as little as $5 a month. Just to get a feel for what these VS (a droplet in digital ocean parlance) are like to use I decided to setup a TeamSpeak 3 server for a quick trial run.

Update (9/14/2013) : The Teamspeak server running on a 512MB Droplet works great. I’ve only used it with 3 people at a time, so if anyone has some experience pushing the server harder please let me know how it worked out. Also I wanted to make clear that the current pricing for a 512MB Droplet is $5.00/Month OR $0.006/Hour, if you want to keep your price really low you can setup the server, shut down the droplet, take a snapshot and destroy the droplet. You won’t be charged for keeping an image and you can spin up the server based on the image whenever you need to run it. If you had it up and running 20Hours/Week it would cost ~ 80 * $0.07 =  $0.50/month! Pretty slick & super cheap Teamspeak server!

Setting Up a Droplet

Setting up a droplet is extremely simple (which is a good thing since that’s the whole point of the service) and starting at $5/month is the most inexpensive virtual server service I have used. Signing up is a snap, just go to https://www.digitalocean.com/ (my referral link) click signup and enter your information.

Once your account is setup, you simply login and:

• Click on the “CREATE” button
• Enter a Hostname
• Select Size, I selected the smallest available droplet for this test run (512MB/1CPU 20GB SSD 1TB Transfer)
• Select Image – Under the “Linux Distribution” tab I selected the latest 64 bit CentOS simply because this is what I’ve been using (CentOS 6.4 x64)
• Click “Create Droplet” button

That’s it! Amazingly simple – in less than a minute the droplet is up and running. Digital Ocean will send you an e-mail with the initial root user name and password for the droplet.

Installing TeamSpeak 3 (3.0.8)

Although this has been covered many times before in other places (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xECUS8dEmLQ), I’m covering my process just to be thorough in my review of doing this on a droplet.

Check your mail for the new droplet e-mail which will contain the droplet IP and root credentials. I’ll be using putty to ssh to my newly created droplet.

login as: root
root@192.168.1.20's password:
[root@Testing ~]#

First things first, change the root password.

[root@Testing teamspeak3-server_linux-amd64]# passwd
Changing password for user root.
New password:
Retype new password:
passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully.
[root@Testing teamspeak3-server_linux-amd64]#

Create a user to run the TeamSpeak server.

[root@Testing teamspeak3-server_linux-amd64]# adduser teamspeak
[root@Testing teamspeak3-server_linux-amd64]# passwd teamspeak
Changing password for user teamspeak.
New password:
Retype new password:
passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully.
[root@Testing teamspeak3-server_linux-amd64]#

Switch to the teamspeak user:

[root@Testing teamspeak3-server_linux-amd64]# su teamspeak

Switch to the teamspeak user’s home directory:

[teamspeak@Testing teamspeak3-server_linux-amd64]$ cd /home/teamspeak

Find the download link for the 64 bit Linux server (see http://www.teamspeak.com/?page=downloads), at the time of this article I see “Server amd64 3.0.8” available at http://files.teamspeak-services.com/releases/3.0.8/teamspeak3-server_linux-amd64-3.0.8.tar.gz.

Armed with this information we can download the file directly onto the droplet using wget:

[teamspeak@Testing ~]$ pwd
/home/teamspeak
[teamspeak@Testing ~]$ wget http://files.teamspeak-services.com/releases/3.0.8/teamspeak3-server_linux-amd64-3.0.8.tar.gz
--2013-09-08 21:32:57--  http://files.teamspeak-services.com/releases/3.0.8/teamspeak3-server_linux-amd64-3.0.8.tar.gz
Resolving files.teamspeak-services.com... 108.162.198.192, 108.162.199.192, 2400:cb00:2048:1::6ca2:c6c0, ...
Connecting to files.teamspeak-services.com|108.162.198.192|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 7156063 (6.8M) [application/x-tar]
Saving to: `teamspeak3-server_linux-amd64-3.0.8.tar.gz'

100{80e463235c561985fcb9d065cb7af58becf1df7010d7a45bb4eb7315e5a8b304}[==============================================================================================================================>] 7,156,063   --.-K/s   in 0.1s

2013-09-08 21:32:58 (58.2 MB/s) - `teamspeak3-server_linux-amd64-3.0.8.tar.gz' saved [7156063/7156063]

[teamspeak@Testing ~]$

I can’t help but notice that the download reached 58.2 MB/s, that’s mighty fast for a $5 VS!

Unpack the downloaded file:

[teamspeak@Testing ~]$ tar -xf teamspeak3-server_linux-amd64-3.0.8.tar.gz
[teamspeak@Testing ~]$

Check that the files are there:

[teamspeak@Testing ~]$ ls -la
total 7020
drwx------ 3 teamspeak teamspeak    4096 Sep  8 22:27 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root      root         4096 Sep  8 17:48 ..
-rw------- 1 teamspeak teamspeak     180 Sep  8 21:10 .bash_history
-rw-r--r-- 1 teamspeak teamspeak      18 Jul 18 13:19 .bash_logout
-rw-r--r-- 1 teamspeak teamspeak     176 Jul 18 13:19 .bash_profile
-rw-r--r-- 1 teamspeak teamspeak     124 Jul 18 13:19 .bashrc
drwxr-xr-x 7 teamspeak teamspeak    4096 Aug  5 13:06 teamspeak3-server_linux-amd64
-rw-rw-r-- 1 teamspeak teamspeak 7156063 Aug 29 08:57 teamspeak3-server_linux-amd64-3.0.8.tar.gz
[teamspeak@Testing ~]$ cd teamspeak3-server_linux-amd64
[teamspeak@Testing teamspeak3-server_linux-amd64]$ ls -la
total 15928
drwxr-xr-x 7 teamspeak teamspeak    4096 Aug  5 13:06 .
drwx------ 3 teamspeak teamspeak    4096 Sep  8 22:27 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 teamspeak teamspeak   40918 Aug  5 13:06 CHANGELOG
-rw-r--r-- 1 teamspeak teamspeak   23854 Aug  5 13:06 LICENSE
drwxr-xr-x 2 teamspeak teamspeak    4096 Aug  5 13:06 doc
-rwxr-xr-x 1 teamspeak teamspeak 4764140 Aug  5 13:06 libts3db_mysql.so
-rwxr-xr-x 1 teamspeak teamspeak 5675839 Aug  5 13:06 libts3db_sqlite3.so
drwxr-xr-x 2 teamspeak teamspeak    4096 Aug  5 13:06 redistributables
drwxr-xr-x 2 teamspeak teamspeak    4096 Aug  5 13:06 serverquerydocs
drwxr-xr-x 4 teamspeak teamspeak    4096 Aug  5 13:06 sql
-rwxr-xr-x 1 teamspeak teamspeak 5760128 Aug  5 13:06 ts3server_linux_amd64
-rwxr-xr-x 1 teamspeak teamspeak    1192 Aug  5 13:06 ts3server_minimal_runscript.sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 teamspeak teamspeak    3728 Aug  5 13:06 ts3server_startscript.sh
drwxr-xr-x 2 teamspeak teamspeak    4096 Aug  5 13:06 tsdns
[teamspeak@Testing teamspeak3-server_linux-amd64]$

Now we will create the TeamSpeak ini file:

[teamspeak@Testing teamspeak3-server_linux-amd64]$ ./ts3server_minimal_runscript.sh createinifile=1
2013-09-09 01:34:54.320374|INFO    |ServerLibPriv |   | TeamSpeak 3 Server 3.0.8 (2013-08-05 13:00:22)
2013-09-09 01:34:54.320561|INFO    |ServerLibPriv |   | SystemInformation: Linux 2.6.32-358.6.2.el6.x86_64 #1 SMP Thu May 16 20:59:36 UTC 2013 x86_64 Binary: 64bit
2013-09-09 01:34:54.322243|INFO    |DatabaseQuery |   | dbPlugin name:    SQLite3 plugin, Version 2, (c)TeamSpeak Systems GmbH
2013-09-09 01:34:54.322310|INFO    |DatabaseQuery |   | dbPlugin version: 3.7.3
2013-09-09 01:34:54.323519|INFO    |DatabaseQuery |   | checking database integrity (may take a while)
2013-09-09 01:34:54.343314|INFO    |SQL           |   | db_CreateTables() tables created

------------------------------------------------------------------
                      I M P O R T A N T
------------------------------------------------------------------
               Server Query Admin Account created
         loginname= "serveradmin", password= "A356W6de"
------------------------------------------------------------------

2013-09-09 01:34:54.511849|WARNING |Accounting    |   | Unable to find valid license key, falling back to limited functionality
2013-09-09 01:34:56.103807|INFO    |              |   | Puzzle precompute time: 1582
2013-09-09 01:34:56.104455|INFO    |FileManager   |   | listening on 0.0.0.0:30033
2013-09-09 01:34:56.108567|INFO    |VirtualSvrMgr |   | executing monthly interval
2013-09-09 01:34:56.108721|INFO    |VirtualSvrMgr |   | reset virtualserver traffic statistics
2013-09-09 01:34:56.265592|INFO    |VirtualServer |  1| listening on 0.0.0.0:9987
2013-09-09 01:34:56.266005|INFO    |VirtualServer |  1| client 'server'(id:0) added privilege key for servergroup 'Server Admin'(id:6)
2013-09-09 01:34:56.266037|WARNING |VirtualServer |  1| --------------------------------------------------------
2013-09-09 01:34:56.266055|WARNING |VirtualServer |  1| ServerAdmin privilege key created, please use the line below
2013-09-09 01:34:56.266072|WARNING |VirtualServer |  1| token=RIq434weeTtkx8512Uussdf3LjIQYB4zTBcpfsI
2013-09-09 01:34:56.266089|WARNING |VirtualServer |  1| --------------------------------------------------------

------------------------------------------------------------------
                      I M P O R T A N T
------------------------------------------------------------------
      ServerAdmin privilege key created, please use it to gain
      serveradmin rights for your virtualserver. please
      also check the doc/privilegekey_guide.txt for details.

       token=qwertyQweRTY12345AsSFEWG35!t5n6432535432
------------------------------------------------------------------

2013-09-09 01:34:56.275439|INFO    |CIDRManager   |   | updated query_ip_whitelist ips: 127.0.0.1,
2013-09-09 01:34:56.276085|INFO    |Query         |   | listening on 0.0.0.0:10011

Copy and store the token.

Ctrl-c to exit the script

^C2013-09-09 01:38:26.988011|INFO    |ServerMain    |   | Received signal SIGINT, shutting down.
2013-09-09 01:38:27.038525|INFO    |VirtualServer |  1| stopped

Edit the ts3server.ini

[teamspeak@Testing teamspeak3-server_linux-amd64]$ pwd
/home/teamspeak/teamspeak3-server_linux-amd64
[teamspeak@Testing teamspeak3-server_linux-amd64]$ vi ts3server.ini

ts3server.ini

machine_id=1
default_voice_port=9987
voice_ip=192.168.1.20
licensepath=
filetransfer_port=30033
filetransfer_ip=192.168.1.20
query_port=10011
query_ip=192.168.1.20
query_ip_whitelist=query_ip_whitelist.txt
query_ip_blacklist=query_ip_blacklist.txt
dbplugin=ts3db_sqlite3
dbpluginparameter=
dbsqlpath=sql/
dbsqlcreatepath=create_sqlite/
dbconnections=10
logpath=logs
logquerycommands=0
dbclientkeepdays=30
logappend=0
query_skipbruteforcecheck=0

Create startup file:

[teamspeak@Testing init.d]$ su root
Password:
[root@Testing init.d]# vi /etc/rc.d/init.d/teamspeak

The file contents

#!/bin/sh
# chkconfig: 2345 99 10
USER="teamspeak"
TS3='/home/teamspeak/teamspeak3-server_linux-amd64'
STARTSCRIPT="$TS3/ts3server_startscript.sh"
cd $TS3
case "$1" in
'start')
su $USER -c "$STARTSCRIPT start"
;;
'stop')
su $USER -c "$STARTSCRIPT stop"
;;
'restart')
su $USER -c "$STARTSCRIPT restart"
;;
'status')
su $USER -c "$STARTSCRIPT status"
;;
*)
echo "Usage $0 start|stop|restart|status"
esac

Set permissions:

[root@Testing init.d]# chmod 755 /etc/rc.d/init.d/teamspeak
[root@Testing init.d]#

2 commands to setup auto run & reboot the server:

[root@Testing teamspeak3-server_linux-amd64]# chkconfig --add teamspeak
[root@Testing teamspeak3-server_linux-amd64]# chkconfig --level 2345 teamspeak on
[root@Testing teamspeak3-server_linux-amd64]# reboot
[root@Testing teamspeak3-server_linux-amd64]#
Broadcast message from root@Testing
        (/dev/pts/0) at 2:46 ...

The system is going down for reboot NOW!

When the server comes back up, log on and check the status:

login as: root
root@192.241.221.11's password:
Last login: Mon Sep  9 02:47:56 2013 from c-72-145-226-187.hsd4.ga.comcast.net
[root@Testing ~]# service teamspeak status
Server is running
[root@Testing ~]#

That’s it, now you can connect with a TeamSpeak client. Each time you reboot the server the TeamSpeak service will automatically start. I’m currently connected to this one with a Windows 64 3.0.11.1 client and all is well. There was no need to create exceptions for iptables, it is just up and running! After I’ve had a chance to evaluate the performance I will update this post.

I haven’t seen a cheaper way to have a dedicate TeamSpeak server, let alone a generic standalone VS. This appears to be a pretty great service at first glance and I’m guessing I’ll be posting more about this service.