Minecraft servers - 1 external IP, 2 servers, 2 ports - avoid specifying port in game - SRV record

Question

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?

I think I may need something like SRV ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRV_record ) anyone have experience with this?

Threads with people that have this working via SRV: http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/1434125-srv-dns-records-server/ - the guy surviveminecraft is in my same situation, and has this working.

-UPDATE/RESOLUTION -

This is how I got this working, hopefully it will help someone else in my position.

I created a subdomain sub.example.com for the secondary server running on the non-standard port. ( 25566 )

In my provided DNS manager, under my SRV settings, I applied this in the provided boxes:

_minecraft._tcp.sub priority:0 weight:5 port:25566 target:<ip address here>

'_minecraft' is just a symbolic name, 'sub' is the name of your subdomain, for example it could be '_tcp.dev' if your subdomain was dev.example.com. Once the subdomain and the SRV are linked, it should work, providing you have the correct port entered and forwarded.

More info in my blog here.

Solution 1

Looks like the Minecraft client issues fetches a SRV record upon connect and uses the info there? Interesting.

Basically you'll need an A record in DNS pointing to your server. You probably already have two of these.

And then two CNAME records naming your first and second instance. The CNAME's need to point to the name in the above A record. Your CNAMEs need to end in the same domain as the respective server, I believe.

And then two SRV records, according to this format:

_minecraft._tcp.cname.domain.tdl. outside_port IN SRV 10 5 internal_port a_record.domain.tdl.

You'd replace cname above with the CNAME's you chose, and substitute the ports in the text above accordingly.

All this needs to be done on your provider's DNS server, or through their configuration utility they may provide. Never configured a SRV record before on a publicly accessible DNS but that's what I take after reading the forum posts you provided.

Solution 2

The port is independent from DNS. This is not possible with DNS, you will need to get a second IP address in order to circumvent the need for specifying a port in Minecraft

Comments

[Tillman32]

Yeah, I've been testing this out now with no luck. I've got to have something wrong here. I'm still fiddling around with it. This is exactly what I need to do though. +1

[Marcks Thomas]

@Tillman32: You can certainly rewrite the destination port server-side based on whatever criteria you want, but I suspect Minecraft will make indistinguishable requests to your servers.

[Tillman32]

Almost have it working, getting a connection refused.

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