Introduction
The rapid switch to full-remote working is causing a lot of issues. On the other side, I can observe that there are a lot of experts and companies that can notice improvement in their delivery because of remote work and suddenly they became ‘remote-always’ gurus.
This article is not an obvious solution on how to maintain organisation culture. I am far away from preaching you how to keep productivity and maintain a casual style of working. It is just a full, hands-on instruction on how to run Counter-Strike: Global Offensive server on AWS to keep the team happy and let them blow off some steam after business working hours. It's practice, not theory.
AWS EC2 configuration
Most of online tutorials indicate that micro instance (https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/t2/) of AWS EC2 is good enough to run the server. So far we can only concur. But when it comes to disk space please go with 100GB option. 30GB is enough to run the server, but it is not enough for updates of the game. And all players know, CS:GO is updated quite often... We do not use Elastic IP. IP changes are quickly communicated on Slack and had no issues with it so far.
CS:GO server setup
It is not rocket science as long as you follow the instruction.
If you follow it step by step everything will be fine. To start the server we use few additional options:
- mp_overtime_enable 1 - to disable draws and make sure one team wins
- sv_password "my_password" - to make sure only invited players can join, otherways some random people will come to play
- +rcon_password "my_password" - to make sure you can change game modes without restarting the server
CS:GO server updates
If you see the error:
"Server is running an older version, client version xxxxx, server version xxxxx"
it means the server or client is outdated.
As the game updates are frequent, the safest option is to have both client and server automatic updates turned on. On the server-side, you have to follow instruction.
Summary
Ok, I hope this article is taken the right way and points out two main things I wanted to focus on:
- sudden spike of remote work experts should be taken with a pinch of salt
- simple activities, like playing CS:GO, can be a nice add-on to keep on the good vibe in the company