Minecraft – How to a script check if the local server is running

Well, I found the answer but I can't take credit for it. I emailed the creator of MineOS Crux directly, William Dizon, and he got back to me in the same day! Very impressed.

Turns out that the default installation of MineOS Crux sets up the Linux firewall (iptables) to only accept incoming Minecraft connections on the default port, 25565. That means even though my second server was merrily running away, any attempts at connecting were blocked. Mr. Dizon passed on this link from the MineOS Crux wiki that explains how to add additional ports to the iptables:

https://minecraft.codeemo.com/mineoswiki/index.php?title=Iptables

Once I followed the steps, set up my additional port for the second server, everything worked! I had forgotten about iptables, and that is a little embarrassing, but live and learn... again ;)

Thanks again to Will Dizon!

My recommended solution for this kind of thing tends to be "Use The System!".

If you have the option, enabling Time Machine from system preferences to create a full disk backup every hour is usually a good idea, and if you don't have the opportunity, you might want to consider getting an external disk and implementing that approach.

If that is completely out of the question for whatever reason, the alternative is using cron.

Setting up the interval running is easy enough, a simple man crontab should give you the information you need on that; but having a script to actually do the backup might be useful:

#!/bin/sh
cd ~/Desktop/MinecraftServer # or the path to your minecraft server directory
rm -rf world.bak
cp -r world world.bak

Save this as a "minecraft_server_backup.sh" and chmod +x it.

This particular script only keeps the most recent backup, and additionally, it doesn't actually check if the server is running before making a backup.