Archive: /dev/null/nethack Tournament Preparations

This is a post I wrote long ago on another site. In this case, it’s from Rusty Foster’s Kuro5hin.Org which has long since disappeared from the Internet.

My brother and I first held a tournament for NetHack players in 1999. We co-hosted it for several years, then I ran it with various volunteers for the rest of its 17-year run. The tournament turns out to also be mentioned on Wikipedia, though it doesn’t have its own page there.

An old post of mine from Kuro5hin.Org, dated “Thu Sep 21st, 2000 at 07:34:53 AM EST”.

/dev/null‘s Second Annual NetHack Tournament, to be called /dev/null/nethack 1900 in honor of the infamous Y2K bug in the high scores file, will begin at midnight (Pacific Time) on October 31st and will run to midnight November 30th.

(To get back to a dispute that was running when K5 went down: yes, I’m the admin at /dev/null, but /dev/null/net is not a profit group and no money is involved; we just do this for the giggles. So though I’m promoting something, and I’m involved in it, I don’t think this is just advertising. There, now we have some continuity back to July … 😉

For this year’s Tourney we’d like to expand with a bit more public participation. As many of the 300+ players last year were on other continents (including roughly half of the winners), we’re looking for volunteers to run gaming servers elesewhere than North America. The minimum system requirements are:

1) a multi-user NetHack installation (thus, probably, a Unix of some sort; the /dev/null server will be an OpenBSD 2.7 system)
2) sufficient speed/disk/memory to support 250 player accounts and 25 concurrent players (ours will be a P133 with 64M of memory and 1.5G of disk)
3) a dedicated Internet connection (our is on dual 384-512k DSL)
4) since NetHack needs real user accounts, we’d recommend that it be a dedicated system (the players will need to be entered in /etc/passwd to play on the box)

Remember, before volunteering, that anyone with admin level access to a game server box is not allowed to compete. So don’t volunteer to host if you want to be a contender. Please send an email to the NetHack Admin if you’re interested.