Minecraft – Two servers, two subdomains, two ports, don’t want to type in :port to connect

minecraft-java-editionnetworking

I have two minecraft servers, on sub-domains. www.server1.example.com and www.server2.example.com. server1 is port 25565, server2 is port 25566.

When users want to connect to a non-default port in minecraft, they have to specify www.server2.example.com:25566 to connect to the server. On the default port, this is not needed, they can simply connect via www.server1.example.com.

How can I pass along which port they're connecting to on the backside of things, so that users connecting to a non-standard port only have to type in the sub domain?

Best Answer

Luckily for you, Minecraft uses SRV records when looking up servers. This allows you to specify a port for each hostname. Simply create two different SRV records in your DNS zone with different hostnames and ports:

_minecraft._tcp.www.server1.example.com.  <TTL>  IN  SRV  <priority>  <weight>   25565   actual-host-server.example.com.
_minecraft._tcp.www.server2.example.com.  <TTL>  IN  SRV  <priority>  <weight>   25566   actual-host-server.example.com.

(Note: I haven't actually used SRV myself; this is based on another page on using SRV with Minecraft.)

Note that actual-host-server.example.com must have an A record; that is, it cannot be a CNAME alias for another domain name.

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