Neverwinter Nights 2 server playbook

This playbook installs the NWN2 server running in a Windows virtual machine (with KVM acceleration), hosted on Ubuntu Server.

It was mainly designed for La Colère d'Aurile, a French persistent/action RPG server.

Note: You should run this on a dedicated server, as KVM nested virtualization can be buggy (I tested on an OVH vps server and got random dead locks related to KVM)

Features

• MySQL compatible server (MariaDB)
• UFW (firewall) configuration to allow nwn2server
• Qemu + KVM virtualization of a Windows guest
  • You must provide your own disk image
  • Configuration of windows to run nwn2server
  • NWNX4 with the default plugins
  • Start nwn2server on boot
  • SPICE remote control with KVM guest tools
• NFS server to share files between the host & guest (more efficient than Samba for small files)
• The windows remote control & MySQL database are only accessible on localhost (ie you have to use a SSH tunnel to access those services)

Available Ansible roles

• nwn2server-common
  • General setup for running one or more nwn2server
• nwn2server
  • The NWN2 server, with its associated nwnx4, module, haks, ... and windows virtual machine.
  • You can run multiple nwn2 servers in multiple virtual machines by adding this role with different nwn2_path_root values
• windows-nwn2server
  • Windows only
  • Setup required software to run the nwn2server & nwnx4 processes

Preparation

Configuration

Copy the files in templates/ to tune your desired configuration and remove the .example part in their name.

NWN2 server binaries

To populate the directory staging/nwn2server with the necessary game files to run the server on the windows virtual machine, run the following command:

./assemble-nwn2server.sh /path/to/nwn2/install/folder

Host setup

• For Ubuntu server 18.04 64 bit
• Required packages:
  • python
• Add your SSH key to the root user

Guest windows setup

• Tested on Windows Server 2012 R2 64 bit and Windows Server 2008 R2 64 bit
• Remote control is done using WinRM over a ssh tunnel
• Disk image must be compressed using the xz format
• To execute the ansible scripts for windows, you need to setup a SSH tunnel as WinRM port is only open for localhosts: ssh -NL 5985:127.0.0.1:5985 root@yourserver.com

Note: you also need to install the pywinrm python2 module on your dev machine

Qemu disk image creation

• Create the disk image

qemu-img create -f raw nwn2server-vmdisk.raw 15G

Note: I had some issues with qcow2 format and nested KVM virtualization, so I used raw format for security. Qcow2 has many advantages, and you can give it a try by setting Ansible variable qemu_disk_format: "qcow2"

• Download virtio windows drivers

wget https://fedorapeople.org/groups/virt/virtio-win/direct-downloads/stable-virtio/virtio-win.iso

• Start the Qemu virtual machine on your host

# Replace PathToTheWindowsInstallDisk with the path to the Windows install disk
sudo qemu-system-x86_64 \
  -name "NWN2Server" \
  -runas $USER \
  \
  -enable-kvm \
  -cpu host \
  -smp cores=1,threads=1,sockets=1 \
  -m 2.5G \
  \
  -drive file="./nwn2server-vmdisk.raw",format=raw,if=virtio \
  \
  -boot d \
  -drive file="PathToTheWindowsInstallDisk",media=cdrom \
  -drive file=virtio-win.iso,media=cdrom \
  \
  -device virtio-net-pci,netdev=net0 \
  -netdev user,id=net0,hostname=nwn2server \
  \
  -device piix3-usb-uhci \
  -device pvpanic \
  \
  -vga qxl \
  -spice addr=127.0.0.1,port=3389,disable-ticketing \
  -device usb-tablet \
  -device virtio-serial \
  -chardev spicevmc,id=vdagent,name=vdagent \
  -device virtserialport,chardev=vdagent,name=com.redhat.spice.0 \
  \
  -monitor stdio

• Connect to the VM using a SPICE client (ex: virt-viewer) on 127.0.0.1:5900

• Configure your windows VM as needed

  • During OS install, you will need to add drivers located in the virtio-win disk X:\viostor\2k12R2\amd64\
  • Once windows in installed:
    • Open the Windows device manager, and for each unrecognized device, right click on it -> update driver, and make windows search drivers in the virtio-win disk.
    • Install the latest spice-guest-tools
  • Run the following commands in powershell to enable WinRM remote control:

    Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ansible/ansible/devel/examples/scripts/ConfigureRemotingForAnsible.ps1 -OutFile ConfigureRemotingForAnsible.ps1
    
    .\ConfigureRemotingForAnsible.ps1 -EnableCredSSP
    
    winrm set winrm/config/service '@{AllowUnencrypted="true"}'

  • Optionally update the windows machine & clean windows updates:
    • Dism.exe /online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup
    • Dism.exe /online /Cleanup-Image /SPSuperseded
  • Optionally defragment & fill empty files with 0 using sdelete.exe -z C: for better compression

• Shutdown the windows VM

• Compress the disk image using xz -k -T0 nwn2server-vmdisk.raw

Ansible usage

Basically you need to write an inventory file:

[nwn2server_host]
your-server-address.com

[nwn2server_host:vars]
# Add any variables from roles/*/defaults you want to override
nwnx4_nwn2server_parameters="-moduledir MagicalWorld"
qemu_disk_download_url="./nwn2server-vmdisk.raw.xz"
qemu_disk_format=raw
mysql_password="SecretMySQLPassword"
servervault_ntfspart_size=3G

[nwn2server_winguest]
# SSH tunnel entry point, 127.0.0.1 unless you are doing strange things :)
127.0.0.1

[nwn2server_winguest:vars]
ansible_user=Administrator
ansible_password="YourWindowsPassword"
ansible_port=5985
ansible_connection=winrm
windows_version=win2012r2

# Add any variables from roles/windows-nwn2server/defaults you want to override
production=False

Then to execute the ansible-playbook:

• ansible-playbook -i inventoryfile host.yml To connect & setup the Ubuntu host system
• ansible-playbook -i inventoryfile winguest.yml To connect & setup the windows virtual machine (dont forget to start the SSH tunnel)

You can also create your own playbook file, to build your own custom server, running for example multiple nwn2server instances (untested).