People love using TeamSpeak 3 Client for gaming or just chatting amongst friends. There's quite a few public servers but, as my nephew found out, they can be a pain at times and he was wishing for his own server. Well, having a Mint system, a dyn.com/dns account and a modem/router that uses it, I figured I could set him up with one.

First Steps

The first stop is getting the tarball at the TeamSpeak website. Select the Downloads link in the menu on the upper right and click on TeamSpeak 3. Under Linux, get the server version you need for your system. Since I'm running a 64-bit version of Mint, I got the Server amd64 3.0.10.3 one. But this tutorial will work for 32-bit (x86) users as well. If you don't know or have forgotten, type uname -p into a Terminal window. It will either say x86_64 for 64-bit installs or x86 for 32-bit installs.

Either way, you've got the proper tarball in your Downloads folder. Next, issue the following command from Terminal to get this puppy rolling:

~ $ tar zxvf Downloads/teamspeak3-server_linux-amd64-3.0.10.3.tar.gz
~ $ cd teamspeak3-server_linux-amd64/

If you downloaded the 32-bit (x86) version, change amd64 to x86 in the above commands.

The Fun Begins

Let's start this puppy up and see what happens! Again, in a Terminal, run the following start command:

~/teamspeak3-server_linux-amd64 $ ./ts3server_startscript.sh start
Starting the TeamSpeak 3 server
TeamSpeak 3 server started, for details please view the log file
~/teamspeak3-server_linux-amd64 $
------------------------------------------------------------------
                  I M P O R T A N T
------------------------------------------------------------------
           Server Query Admin Account created
     loginname= "serveradmin", password= "7@ND07@K35"
------------------------------------------------------------------


------------------------------------------------------------------
                  I M P O R T A N T
------------------------------------------------------------------
      ServerAdmin privilege key created, please use it to gain
      serveradmin rights for your virtualserver. please
      also check the doc/privilegekey_guide.txt for details.

       token=Vj2P6HSisymJ3S0iPXL++uSMTs01XTdHzAcl4uXP
------------------------------------------------------------------

Wow – that's a lot of info! I copied the I M P O R T A N T text into my favorite text editor (Pluma) and saved it. Then I changed permissions on the file so that only I could read it. While I've never used the Server Query Admin Account info, you do have to use the Privilege Key with TeamSpeak 3 to gain access to the server as an admin. So, in Teamspeak 3 client, connect to your new server:

Once connected, you'll be prompted for the Privilege Key:

Enter your Privilege Key (not mine) and click on the OK button and you're all setup as an admin!

The cool thing is, the Privilege Key only works once. So giving it out to other people will not make them admins. But you can use the client to create new Privilege Keys that you can give out to people you trust.

Privacy Can Be A Good Thing

If you don't want just anyone connecting to your TeamSpeak 3 Server, in the TeamSpeak 3 Client, right click on the server and choose Edit Virtual Server. You can not only change the display name of your new server but add a password as well.

Firewall Port Forwarding Rules

To get other people to connect to your local machine behind your router's firewall you need to open up UDP port 9987 by doing the whole port forwarding thing with your router. This is left as an exercise to the reader as each router is different.

Once the ports are forwarded properly, you can have your friends connect via a dyn.com/dns hostname or by your external IP address (Google “my ip address” if you don't know it).

One Last Thing...

So far so good! If you haven't noticed, logging in and out of Linux Mint doesn't stop the TeamSpeak 3 Server from running. But, of course, a reboot will. The easy way to fix this is to simply add a Startup Application.

Click on the Menu launcher and select Control Center. Under Personal, click on the Startup Applications icon. Once the Startup Applications Preferences window has loaded, click on the Add button.

For the Command text box put:

/home/USER/teamspeak3-server_linux-amd64/ts3server_startscript.sh start

Change USER to be your username. If you're running 32-bit, change amd64 to x86. Now click the Add button. While this is an easy fix, I typically stop the server from the command line before doing a reboot. Luckily, I don't reboot that often. Typically only during kernel and/or glibc updates. So it hasn't been much of an issue for me.

Conclusion

As you can see, the installation isn't bad at all. A bit of command line stuff and playing with the client. I know my nephew loves his new TeamSpeak 3 Server. Have fun and enjoy running a server of your own!