Cortex - Overview

Submitted by Micky on Fri, 04/27/2007 - 22:21
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Overview:

Cortex works much like any other web-based application. It is built upon a series of scripts, in this case PHP, works with daemons that users can interact with, and saves it's data to a database. Cortex uses a mySQL database to save it's game configs, map lists, users, and Cortex's settings. Cortex is bundled with its own web, database, FTP, and mail servers. Game servers are downloaded from the Cortex Update Server and distributed through your file system as playable games. This process is described in more detail in the Administrator Manual.

Cortex is designed to install onto the system without interfering with existing web, database, ftp and mail servers. It installs its own operating system services and installs game instances as OS services as well.

Game Support:

As of the time of this writing Cortex supports the following game and voice chat servers:

System Requirements:

  • Processor: Any i686 compatible processor or better
  • RAM: At least 64M
  • Free Hard Drive Space: 80M
  • A broadband connection to the Internet
  • At least one static IP address bound to your server's network interface
  • Operating System: Windows 2003, Redhat Enterprise Linux v3, Redhat Enterprise Linux v4
  • Root or Administrator access to your server

Cortex itself does not need much in the way of processor, memory, or hard drive space. The game servers it supports, however will likely require vastly more resources. While Cortex was designed to run on an "always on" dedicated server it should function in a non-dedicated environment.

The Windows version of Cortex is very dependant on the Windows Management Interface functions, and for this reason will only work in Windows Server 2003. Windows 2000 server and below are not supported and should not work. Cortex's service scripts are created to function on RedHat Enterprise Linux systems, and have not been tested in other Linux environments. Cortex should work on other RedHat distributions like Fedora, or RedHat-like distributions such as CentOS, but they have not been tested on these and are unsupported. To ensure that game servers work in RedHat Enterprise Linux v4 or systems running glibc v2.3 and above you should install the compat-glibc-headers, compat-glibc, and compat-libstdc++ packages.

Please note that Cortex will not function properly on servers running behind Network Address Translation. If your server runs NAT or is behind a NAT enabled router or firewall you will need to either create static address or port mappings for each game server and for Cortex in order for Cortex and your game servers to be accessible to the public.

We recommend against installing Cortex into an environment where another game or web hosting control panel is already installed. The existance of two or more control panels on the system may lead to instabilities.

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