Hello all, I am Alex Paider, a junior computer science major here at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. You might be wondering why a random student decided to host a set of public minecraft servers for college students. First, we should go back to my middle and high school days playing video games with friends. I've hosted game servers (mostly modded minecraft) for 1-4 people many times on my personal computer. I first thought of the idea of a server for all of UNL in my freshman year living in Abel (the best residence hall). I set it all up like I usually would, but ran into a problem; I can't perform one of the most important steps of hosting a server: port forwarding. The university manages the network, and letting a random student mess with the settings was completely off the table. Now, 2 years later, I'm living at home and decided to give it another go, this time with proper security measures and principles that I've learned in my classes.
Next, a disclaimer, I have used AI for the vast majority of this project. I have an extensive conversation history with Gemini AI, which I used to generate all the commands and many of the programs and services. It has helped me create something that would have taken weeks of research, trial, and error in around 12 total hours (not at one time). This is time that most students, and frankly most adults, just don't have to spend on a game about blocks. I want to assure you that I am not in favor of the political bribery, lack of concern for the public at large, and malicious practices that AI companies are a part of. I do think that they are useful tools for the right purpose, and certain types of AI are very helpful. That being said, I did use AI for this entire project, even the design document that follows (but NOT this introduction).
If you've made it to this point, thank you, for visiting this page, taking the time to learn about me and what I've made, and for playing my servers maybe...? Regardless, Thank You.
The physical backbone of this project is a dedicated, small-form-factor mini PC operating as the central host. Rather than renting expensive external enterprise hardware, this local machine is responsible for running the active game instances, web services, and background daemon processes.
Exposing a local home machine directly to the public internet introduces significant security risks. To mitigate this, the system uses a hybrid cloud routing approach that completely masks the local network:
To ensure seamless gameplay without compromising security, inbound game traffic follows a strict, multi-step routing path:
This entire infrastructure was architected, configured, and deployed utilizing an AI-assisted development model. Gemini AI functioned as the primary technical consultant throughout the project lifecycle, guiding the integration of the cloud network, firewall packet routing, and web server configurations to successfully transform a standard mini PC into a professional-grade hosting environment.