Using a MariaDB jail with Dynmap for Minecraft

Recently I posted about our Minecraft server, and mentioned on Mastodon that I’d rebuilt our Dynmap server with MariaDB. A few of you wanted to know what I was talking about, what I did, and why, especially those of you maintaining servers for their kids. Clara and I started playing Minecraft as a silly distraction during the 2020 COVID lockdowns, and we’re still playing on the same map and server today. As such, we’ve explored large swaths of the map, with coordinates stretching into the tens of thousands. You could use the in-game maps for this, but it gets unwieldy quickly. Dynmap isn’t the only mapping software you can use to render an OpenStreetMap-style web view of your server, but it’s the one we’ve used for years. It lets you define points, lines, and areas of interest. You can also import your own icons for pins, which we use for our train stations. And if you throw a proxy server on top, you can even share the map with friends :). We use the excellent PaperMC as our…