Coder on Fire. Blog

Andrew Mason's personal blog

Administering an EC2 Minecraft server using SSH on Android

I've already blogged about my love for Minecraft, so the natural next step was to setup our own server for co-op gameplay. It turned out to be a good time too as Amazon is offering free micro EC2 servers for a year.
Getting the server up and running was simple, with a very nice how-to guide on the forums for additional guidance. However, one thing remained, administration.

As a group we all have access to the server, but seeing as its running on Linux and Minecraft is a little flaky, there's a good chance we'll need to restart the application or reboot the server. So what happens if the server falls over when I'm out enjoying a Black sheep? That's where Android steps in. Some very nice programmers have made connectbot, a secure shell application that allows me to SSH into the server and run terminal commands. What makes connectbot even better is that it supports .pem keys, meaning I have passwordless access to the box.

I used Dropbox to copy the .pem certificate to my mobile, set up the server in connectbot, linked to the .pem and that was it. The soft-keyboard interface takes a while to get use to but its easy to learn.

So there we have it, remote SSH access to our Minecraft server via my mobile phone. Now we just have to wait for the Minecraft update so we can use the portal and enter the Nether.

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Is Google Using its own SSL Certificates?

Checking my HTC Hero custom Android 2.1 ROM mobile this morning I was alerted to a security problem. The browser certificate on google.com was throwing up security warnings. On closer inspection it seems the certificate was issued by the "google interenet authority".

I really don't like the smell of this. Either Google are trialing something that has accidentally been exposed, or more likely, there is something malicious going on with the custom ROM.

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