Looking for advice here. What is the best Windows OS for hosting a NWN 1 PW?

[Legacy_Vicar 77]

               2003? 2008 sp2? 2008 R2?

Thank you.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Ansalon II Admin]

               I'm running under Windows XP SP3 with no problems. Dunno what it would be like under something more recent,
I would DEFINITELY discourage running it under Windows 8
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Vicar 77]

               Thanks for the response but I was refering to Server OS, not PC. Nobody has any input on this?
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_HipMaestro]

               

Vicar 77 wrote...
Thanks for the response but I was refering to Server OS, not PC. Nobody has any input on this?

Hang in there and eventually the PW admins will begin the check in on this.  Actually, I'm a bit surprised there hasn't been a sticky started about this issue already (Perhaps there was one on the legacy boards that never made the transition over? Dunno.).

I believe there are some advocates of Linux and a few of the servers I've frequented in the past use that OS.  What I'd probably do (assuming I'd intend to sponsor a PW myself) is start up a convo with the admin(s) of the PWs that I enjoy the most and seem the most stable.  Not all of the admins check into the BSN regularly.  Until you begin to glean some quantitative evaluation through the forumites, at least you'll get some useful input that way.

Bump.

edit:  Found a thread in this subforum which addresses some of the considerations.  There may be others if you poke back further.
               
               

               

                     Modifié par HipMaestro, 12 juillet 2013 - 04:14 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_The Amethyst Dragon]

               My server (Aenea) is running on a Windows XP SP3 machine.  Don't have experience running the server on Linux or other versions of Windows myself.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Fatal Assassin]

               You will not find what you are looking for here Vic. Everyone here is a linux snob, or just out for their own interest. So good luck with that. Desciminating such information might hurt their own PWs... so yeah... not much chance at getting this informatiom. Have fun with that though....
               
               

               

                     Modifié par Fatal Assassin, 13 juillet 2013 - 05:31 .
                     
                  

            

[Baaleos]

               I use windows server 2003, for my own PW.
But I am also hosting 3 pw's for other people on
1. Ubuntu 12.00 server,
And the other 2 are on 2 Windows Server 2008 machines.

Best I can tell: performance wise Linux will always win ands down, although user friendly Windows servers win.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Vicar 77]

               I am a fan of Linux myself, however the world I am involved in is already established and set up for Windows. We are using windows server 2003 also. Which 2008 are you using? SP2 or R2?
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_kalbaern]

               

Fatal Assassin wrote...

You will not find what you are looking for here Vic. Everyone here is a linux snob, or just out for their own interest. So good luck with that. Desciminating such information might hurt their own PWs... so yeah... not much chance at getting this informatiom. Have fun with that though....

Uhm ... Wow! Someone has ran out of their "happy" pills I think.

Though more than a few here would promote using Linux, there's only one PW Admin that would likely qualify as a "Linux Snob" on these boards. They certainly don't speak for the rest of us. Infact, the vast majority of PWs hosted run under a version of Windows and not Linux.

I've used both Windows Server 2003 and 2008 in the past and can't claim a preference or even cite one as distinctly better suited to the task. Currently, like "Ansalon II Admin" and "The Amethyst Dragon" above, I'm hosting using Windows XP SP3.

The actual requirements for hosting are lower than those for playing, so I generally use my older machines to host from and newer ones for building and playing. If your ONLY planning to host a PW, then any of the above choices should be fine. If the server will serve duel duty and host a website, forum, file transfers, etc... , then I'd looked to those other services to see if a certain OS is best suited over the rest.
               
               

               

                     Modifié par kalbaern, 13 juillet 2013 - 03:32 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_Fatal Assassin]

               Yep. I am all out of happy pills... It was more just a general comment of the cliquey nature of this community. You are either in, or you are out. You are either in the know or not.

Glad to see some people actually stepped forward and offered some useful information for the OP after my little comment though.
               
               

               

                     Modifié par Fatal Assassin, 14 juillet 2013 - 07:45 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_Ansalon II Admin]

               I see no reason to use a 'Server OS' for something as simple as NWN1 and MySQL. Can you say 'overkill'. I'm pretty sure it will run no better than on good old XP.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Vicar 77]

               Thanks for the input everyone. It sounds like any of the Windows server OS are viable options (although still not clear about 2008 RT vs SP2.) Baaleos and Klabaerm you both stated you have used 2008. Which one did you use?
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_painofdungeoneternal]

               I think that it depends on what you are doing.

Are you doing a PW on a really old system, or have a very large player base, then you probably want to use a lighter or older OS which has less overhead. If you want security you probably want a current OS.

If you are using it for more than one thing, ie you play and host from the same machine, and you are just doing a bit of coop play, windows is probably better.

If you are paying to have it at a colo facilty and have your own hardware, then you'd probably want to go the Server OS route. And further if you have to pay for a license for it, well linux is just cheaper.

A big thing you can do though with linux, is use multiple cores via virtualization, thus even NWN2 PW admins which cannot host on linux are actually setting up a windows virtual machine on a linux server, then using another core to host the website and still another to host the database. They are getting a lot better performance this way. You can do this on windows too, but the advantage of linux is it can be setup to have a lot less overhead.

You can do this with whatever OS you are using, and if you know windows, or know linux, then you probably should use that. The learning curve would decide the issue, and a expert in either OS will do something better using their preferred OS.

If you have ancient hardware, i would prefer linux as well, just because you can choose a variant which has very low overhead, very little memory usage, and can remove all the services and tasks which are not absolutely essential. And also get the latest and greatest version. Windows tends to prefer better systems as you go up in version, and using an old version can help performance but often has security issues. Remember putting a email server on a 486 and red hat linux at one point ( this was a great while ago, but this 486 would have been thrown out otherwise ), and actually ended up with better performance with this than using the windows server on a brand new system just do to having less overhead in both the email software and the OS.

Another issue is the nwnx plugins, which ones do you need, and which OS are they available for. Some things you just can't do on windows and vice versa.

Me personally, if i was aiming at doing a cutting edge PW, and assuming the goal is the best experience for the players, i would probably use Centos, since i know it, and perhaps do some virtual machines with either windows or linux on them. But then this assumes I am doing a real server. I would assume a "server" is better using a unix variant since this is the primary purpose for which unix is actually used, just like i would assume windows is better for playing a video game because this is how more people use it. The question becomes are you using this to play a game, or do you actually use this to "serve" those playing games.

However if this is more of a hobby, the OS is just not that important, it's probably more likely to actually launch the PW using whatever OS is available, and as long as it's under 10 players, it will run just fine on anything, even a small DSL connection. I personally used windows 2003 server, but then i also was running a NWN2 PW, and required NWNx plugins for windows, and i had usually about 15 players at most, and i had a copy of it. I had windows 2000 server before, and i had kept that since i had very old code running cold fusion on a companion website, but since the NWNx plugins allowed C# byte code style processing of scripts ( thus making scripts run almost like native C programs ), i converted the site to PHP. But this is based on my skills and what i had, the question should be less on that and what do you hope to achieve and what is the best way to get there.

That being said, it's still a computer on the internet, it behooves you to have the latest version with current bug and exploit fixes ( and a real server os is going to perform better ), and to shut down and uninstall anything on it which is not actually needed.

( the s3 stuff someone was promoting is also worth looking at as well. )
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_kalbaern]

               

Vicar 77 wrote...

Thanks for the input everyone. It sounds like any of the Windows server OS are viable options (although still not clear about 2008 RT vs SP2.) Baaleos and Klabaerm you both stated you have used 2008. Which one did you use?

2008 RT, but not by choice, by convenience. I've a few backup servers for my job and use them whenever my normal XP machine I host on has issues is all.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_AlgernonsGhost]

               Windows XP SP3 here. I'm using an older dual core system solely for hosting.

I had some troubles with lag initially after relaunching the old PW, and wound up turning off CPU core affinity so that the OS could manage the core usage instead (set: Client CPU Affinity=-2 in nwplayer.ini). This cured the problem.

It may seem contrary to the advice you'll get with a google search, but it has worked for me, especially on my play/DM machine, which has 6 cores under Win 7. It was intermittently laggy with just one client, and after letting the OS manage the cores, I can run two DM/player instances of NWN at the same time with no problem.

Windows has done a lot of work with the OS to make it more effective with running essentially single threaded programs on multi-core systems.