Add debug support

[gionn]

Hi,

I was trying this with Left4Dead2, but I've run into problems, and it looks like a bug on L4D2 side.

It may be a good idea to add to init.sh to ease debug of crashing servers:

# increase core dump size
ulimit -c unlimited

and adding gdb to the packages installed during build.

[cliffrowley]

Ah very good, I haven't run a wide ranging test with different servers yet so this is really good feedback.

Out of interest, are you using this in anger, or just toying with it? If you are hosting in a similar way to me there's probably quite a lot we could share. I host a bunch of servers for friends & family on a dedicated server with various virtual machines and am in the process of converting most (as much as I can) to Docker containers and letting them have a bit more control over them (e.g. starting/stopping, loading custom worlds/mods etc).

[gionn]

I work on ClouDesire.com, a general application marketplace with docker support, we also did a market test with a vertical gaming marketplace a few months ago (cloudparty.io).

We are looking for something to simplify the maintenance of game servers, since maintaining each image alone is a waste of resource and precious disk space. And I think that your approach to this problem is the greatest I've seen so far, since SteamCMD is just good enough to be used for every game.

[cliffrowley]

Very interesting. Personally I have no commercial stake in any of this at this time, it's purely a marriage of my work and one of my hobbies.

Ultimately what I want to provide to my players is a way to manage their own game server instances at the container level and for me to be able to create game servers for them to choose from simply by referencing docker containers and ask them to fill in some blanks for configuration. So essentially this would be one piece of the puzzle, along with some kind of standard format to encapsulate configuration of different servers in a way that I can then present it in a nice and friendly web interface. Not sure what that is yet - haven't thought that far ahead.

I'd be very happy to share a project like this if you're interested in toying with it with me and seeing where it leads. If IP is a concern, I'll be up front and say I'd prefer this remain open source - but with a fully free license like MIT or BSD, so you'd be free to pursue commercial endeavours based on anything we come up with.

Anywho, I'm just spitballing here really. I've been crunching this one on the back burner for a while now, since I discovered the joy of containers and I'm really interested in how it can be applied to game server hosting.

[cliffrowley]

Actually if you don't mind I'll add you as a contributor regardless, since I think you'll probably get around to implementing some of these things quicker than I can - I'm up to my eyeballs in setting up a whole new architecture for our internal system at work and I suspect I won't get a chance to work on my own stuff for at least another couple of weeks..

[cliffrowley]

Also, your beard is epic.

[gionn]

Thanks, will see what came up with all this :)