Technical Summary

In April 2021 I have started my own dedicated L4D-server.
Thanks to cosmicD, that gave me support doing this!

Hardware setup

kNiLs server runs at my home at my Synology NAS (DS918+) in an docker environment (read below), so it does not run on it’s own dedicated hardware but shares resources with many other services:

  • Intel® Celeron® Prozessor J3455 (Apollo Lake, x86)
    • 4 cores @ 1.5 GHz (up to 2.3 GHz), max. 4 threads
    • 2 MB Cache
  • 16 GB RAM DDR3L-1866
  • 16 TB storage (3x 8 TB in Raid5) with
  • 512 GB SDD-cache (Raid1) in front

Software / OS environment

Most of my services run in docker environment, so kNiL’s L4D-server does too. I had set it up my own docker image from the scratch, based on ubuntu:latest.

Valve offers steamcmd to setup and update dedicated servers, which I used to get the game files into the docker container.

Rest of the story is nerd stuff, that I don’t want to research at this point, as the server is running since 2021 – without any major updates. If someone is really interested, just ask and I take a look. 🙂

Network setup

Well, this is quite basic, because it runs in my home network. So I can at play via LAN and others can connect from outside.

  • direct port forward (port 27015 TCP/UDP) from my router to the exposed docker port on my NAS
  • public IP4 is almost static, but it may change!
    (use ping knil.chickenkiller.com to get the current IP if you need it for your autoexec.cfg !)
  • as for all my services I use Uptime Kuma to monitor servers status (current status is unknown)

L4D-server configuration

The dedicated server itself is empowered with several addOns to improve players and admins experience:

  • sm_admin
  • tba

Several addOn campaigns are on the server, so you can play them:

  • tba