QuakeOnLan - Raspberry Pi Quake server

[Mat Linnett]

So I've been playing around with the Raspberry Pi image provided by the good folks over at QuakeOnLan these past few days, and thought I'd post some general configuration stuff here.

First off, a description of what the image provides:
Quake, Quake 2 and Quake 3 servers all running on a Raspberry Pi. Mine's a Pi3, and I also run a Mumble server for voice chat on the same box. It handles it all fantastically, and is a real eye-opener for such a low-power machine. I can just have it running all the time.

It runs several modes for each game:

Quake
CTF
Deathmatch
Botmatch
Quake Fortress

Quake 2
CTF
Deathmatch
Lithium II
Rocket Arena
Duel
Botmatch

Quake 3
CTF
Deathmatch
Duel

While the site is very good for getting you up and running, it's a little lacklustre when it comes to fine-tuning your servers.
While I haven't used it for Quake 2 yet, I have set mine up to play original Quake and Quake 3, and have tweaked the settings to my liking, as well as adding more custom maps than the image already comes with (and it comes with a generous amount of excellent community maps for each game).

Handy things for customising your servers:
Enable SSH on your Pi and change its password (Default password for the user pi is raspberry . Change it with the command sudo passwd pi )
PuTTY
WinSCP and your favourite text editor

As noted on the site, once you've downloaded the image, you'll need some way of writing it to your Pi's Micro SD card; I picked up a USB SD Card adapter for my PC and used Balena Etcher to burn the image to the card.

As noted above, after booting the image for the first time, you should enable SSH on your Pi change the pi user's password.

Next, you should run a full update on your Pi:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

At this point, you're good to go with the basic configurations the QuakOnLan team have provided. The servers all start with the Pi.

You can access a WebGUI to control basic server set-up from a web browser on any machine connected to the same network as your Pi. Simply pop the Pi's IP address in your browser's address bar and hit return.

But the config settings provided probably aren't in-depth enough for you; they certainly weren't fo me.
So you'll need to know where the server.cfg files are for each server.

For Quake, they're in:
/usr/local/games/quake/ then id1, bots, ctf or fortress depending on which mode you want to modify.

For Quake 2, they're in:
/usr/local/games/quake2/ then baseq2, ctf, bots, lithium or arena depending on which mode you want to modify.

For Quake 3, it's in:
/usr/lib/ioquake3/baseq3

The easiest way to modify them, unless you're familiar with the Pi's command line, is to use WinSCP to access your Pi using its IP address and the user pi and its password.
Once in, you can browse to the server.cfg files at the locations listed above, then open them with your favourite text editor (I use Notepad++

You can also use WinSCP to upload new maps to the Pi, although this is also supported in the WebGUI.

Finally, while the guys at QuakeOnLan advise against it, you can make your servers visible on the Internet. Open ports 27500 and 27960 for your Pi's IP address on your router.
There are very good reasons you shouldn't do this! The image provided by QuakeOnLan is the same for every user who downloads it, and so is quite insecure.
Running update and upgrade on the Pi might help, as would password protecting your servers, but this is still a widely available image, so do so at your own peril!

Oh, and if you want to run Mumble on the Pi too, there's a great guide here.
The Mumble client can be downloaded here.

[Eraser]

It handles it all fantastically, and is a real eye-opener for such a low-power machine.

Dude, Quake is 25 years old

[Mat Linnett]

I know, I know, but it's running all those servers and a VOIP server at the same time

Admittedly, I've yet to see how it handles more than one active match at a time, but for a £35 box, it's pretty damn good!

[Lieutenant Dan]

This is sweet! Glad to see this being a thing.