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Running Overviewer on a Server
Running Overviewer on a server poses some special challenges, and this page documents them. If you're just looking for how to run Overviewer normally, see the Quick Start Guide.
Overviewer uses the terrain.png file that comes with the Minecraft client to render its maps. If you're running on the server, chances are the Minecraft client isn't installed. If Overviewer tells you it can't find terrain.png, either install the client on your server, or extract the terrain.png file from minecraft.jar, and put it in the same directory as Overviewer.
Overviewer has full support for texture packs, so if you want to, you can download the terrain.png from your favorite texture pack and use that instead.
Minecraft doesn't really like it when other programs go snooping around in a live world, so running Overviewer on a live world usually creates a few errors, usually "corrupt chunk" errors. You can do this, but it's not a supported way of running Overviewer.
To get around this, you can copy your live world somewhere else, and render the copied world instead. If you're already making backups of your world, you can use the backups to make the render. Many people even use their backups to run Overviewer on a different machine than the one running the Minecraft server.
There are two things to be careful about, though. The first is a file called overviewer.dat that Overviewer writes into the world directory on each render. The second is preserving file modification times.
If you copy a live world every time you render, you must be careful to keep the overviewer.dat file, and not overwrite it, or the sign markers on the rendered map won't work right. You can do this by copying overviewer.dat to a safe place after each render, then copying it back before the next render.
The other thing to be careful about is file modification times, which Overviewer uses to figure out what parts of the map need updating. If you do a straight copy, usually this will update the modification times on all the copied files, causing Overviewer to re-render the entire map. To copy files on Unix, while keeping these modification times intact, use cp -p. For people who render from backups, GNU tar automatically handles modification times correctly. If you use some other tool, you'll have to figure out how to do this yourself.