Minecraft Grey Lists

Anti-Griefing

A few weeks ago my son's Minecraft world became trashed (buildings completely obliterated) by friends of a friend who visited our server. Thankfully we had a backup to restore from and then to ensure it didn't happen again we turned on white lists in the server.properties file.

But the story doesn't end here... a few days ago number one son asked me if I knew anything about grey lists, informing me roughly what they're supposed to do. Apparently if you set up a grey list then it enables anyone to join the server but they're restricted from building. This was new to me and seems ideal, meaning he'd be able to pass about the server connection details freely without worrying about being griefed again.

Grey Lists

The vanilla server only supports black lists (to ban people) or white lists (to only allow access to those listed). There's no setting in the properties file to enable grey lists, so I googled until I found that a plugin called PermissionsEx. This enables you to define access groups with appropriate rights, and assign users to them.

But you can't add plugins to the vanilla version of Minecraft server,.. there's no plugin directory, instead you have to use the CraftBukkit server instead. (Click here for download page)

While I'm at it, here's the link for the PermissionsEx plugin. (Click here for download page)

Installing Bukkit & PermissionsEx

Here's the steps we went through:

1. Edit your server.properties file and disable white-lists if you where using them.
2. Download the craftbukkit jar file and copy it into your minecraft server directory.
3. Run the craftbukkit server program to create the extra files and folders (it also converts your world files).
4. Download the PermissionEx jar files and copy these into the newly created plugin directory.
5. Restart the server again and a PermissionEx sub-directory will be created.
6. Change to this directory but leave config.yml alone.
7. Edit the permissions.yml file and replace the contents with the following lines, then add your users into the end section (in line with the examples).

groups:
    default:
        default: true
        options:
            rank: '1000'
        permissions:
        - modifyworld.chat
    Builder:
        prefix: '&0(&8Builder&0)&7 '
        permissions:
        - modifyworld.*
        options:
            rank: '900'
    Moderator:
        prefix: '&0(&1Moderator&0)&7 '
        permissions:
        - -modifyworld.mobtarget.*
        - modifyworld.*
        options:
            rank: '100'
    Admin:
        prefix: '&0(&4Admins&0)&7 '
        permissions:
        - -modifyworld.mobtarget.*
        - modifyworld.*
        - permissions.*
        options:
            rank: '1'
users:
    SomePlayerName:
        group:
        - Builder
    YourPlayerName:
        group:
        - Admin

NB. Ensure you don't add any spaces before 'groups' or 'users' or the file will be ignored.

We found that if your name is in the ops.txt file then you automatically get admin level.

Follow this link for further details on configuration and how to type /pex commands when in the game.

Finally I updated the /etc/init.d/minecraft startup script to use the CraftBukkit jar file.