In my personal oppinion it's better to provide some sources of where to get the file. I could have use GameRanger back in 2014 but I didn't like the registration. Also I used to provide the executables for free without registration (which also increased the actually online players a lot).

I know you guys only used GameMaster because you've made own executables and also provide a download in your download section for them.

And you can't deny someone from hosting them on another site. You don't have any copyright on the executable files so he can distribute them all the way he want.

It's always better to provide as much executables as possible around the communities to get as much people as possible connected together with one solution. If you don't want to distribute your hosting solution to anybody outside of you community just make your forums private to any guest - the only thing you don't need is to provide actually support for any other executables so people would use them at their own risk.

DNS Server isn't a really easy stuff. You'll need to secure it. If you're reading a few tutorials (can't recommend an english one, I used to set it up on my own) you can easily install and manage it. I used "dnsmasq", which is an really easy one. I used to redirect all gamespy.com (and *.gamespy.com stuff) to my masterserver.

And yes, wildcard should be working with your provider. If you're unsure how to do that stuff, ask your domain provider

LED, to support all kinds of games (if you want to) it would be better to use an wildcard subdomain like *.swbfspy.com that would probably give you the possibility to host other games as well as the battlefront games.

Also I had recently got a mail from the ps2 battlefront community. They would need a DNS server for actually be able to play Battlefront 1 / 2 on PS2, if you want to.

Okay, Jedikiller just spinned up a new virtual machine with Ubuntu 16.04 and I managed to get all the stuff working (after 3 hours)! So he no knows all the neccessary things to run gamemaster for gamespy games at all.

At least we had the following agreements:
- they'll add credits to gameshare.co
- new user database (every user needs to register a new account, for security I won't give them all the current users)
- i will redirect all the hostnames (d.gameshare.me, u.gameshare.me, gamespy.onl) for at least one month to the new IP address so that the games will still work. Only PS2 / hosts file will get a change at all.
- they won't disturb me with requests regarding any kind of problems / bugs / whatever with gamemaster and these tools. They can create a github issue (https://github.com/derkalle4) because gamemaster is open source but I don't know if I will ever have the time to change things.

Thank you for keeping the services online - and good luck in future!

Best regards,
Kalle

I just have sunday time all the day (german timezone). Just ready when you are to talk a little bit about server problems. Teamviewer prefered for remote hands.

To have Anyder as an "man in the middle" is maybe not ideal. So I start to discuss with you in this forum thread

The german masterserver is hosted by myvirtualserver.com and can maybe directly transfered to another owner. I don't know. It costs about 3,49€ / month. The second server is hosted by digitalocean and costs about 5€/month. I also have the domains "d.gameshare.me", "u.gameshare.me" and "*.gameshare.onl". I could redirect this domains to the new server(s), of course. But then you have to agree to not host any kind webpages on this available domains nor make any redirects to another pages for them.

Because of the money:
It was never a thing because of "to less money" for me. I had the paypal button for at least ~ 1,5years for now and only a few people (thanks for that!) spent some money. I've got around 40€ at all. That's not much compared to the costs for the virtual servers for a year + domains + time to answer just every thread on my community forums, but It was something good that people have done.

In my current situation I don't have the time that I need to spent to the whole project. At least a complete code rewrite would be neccessary to eliminate most of the bugs and to add support for new games at all. We don't have an 100% masterserver emulator for gamespy, it's just 70/80% right now. And there's much space for optimization, too.

Because of the two masterserver thing:
Some people in your community have the meaning that a "german" masterserver gives you a pad ping on your servers in US or somewhere else far away from germany. That's simply not true. I discussed a lot and I don't know why ever people still think that there is a need for a second masterserver. Last word in this: the masterserver is an application to give players a serverlist of available servers for their game and also provides some kind of account management. Your game client does not connect to the gameserver of your choice through the masterserver itself, you will directly connect to the gameserver of your choice. Your ping to this gameserver depends on your internet connection to this specific gameserver. So at least, hosting one virtual machine with at least 256MB RAM (double it to be safe...) and 1 vCPU would be enough to host the entire infrastructure. At least I've got a second masterserver to have a little load balancing, for worst case scenarios (one masterserver is not available atm -> so half of the people could play regardless of this case) and for destroying any discussion about bad pings... that was why I hosted a second server in america for 5€/month. It was for YOU guys

Because of the installation of the masterserver and all it's components:
In term of privacy I wouldn't recommend to use the user database (most entries are old and never used) and I won't give these entries to you. All passwords are encrypted but I can't make sure that you guys will decrypt them and try to login to popular web services. What I could help you guys initially is to a) make a video about hosting a gamemaster infrastructure or b) to install such a masterserver on an linux based distribution (Ubuntu 16.04 prefered) and give some of you advices over teamviewer. But only once. I don't have the time to correct problems in future. I don't wan't to improve the masterserver and make bugfixes because nobody can help me to make things even better. I searched for developers a year ago and I decided to make this code Open Source on 01.01.2016 and nobody helped me, either.

So do what you want to do with the sources and the virtual server and let me just out of all related administrative tasks. Server administration needs time and some knowledge about linux and other things. Don't be dump and buy a virtual server if you have no knowledge about how to secure it and tell me to install the software on it.

Best regards,
Kalle