2/17/2022:
Recently, my grandson and I switched from playing World of Warcraft on Sunday afternoons back to Minecraft, our original game. We host our server on an Amazon World Server (AWS). I tried to update our Minecraft server from version 1.17.1 to 1.18.1, but the AWS had apparently gotten too bloated for upgrades. I had substantial help from my son to set up the first AWS server, which hosted many Minecraft servers. I set out to set up a new AWS on my own yesterday. It was definitely a learning experience. First, I created a new instance, then an elastic IP, then associated the elastic IP with the instance. The setup and association were a little tricky, but it did not take too long. One mistake I made was not having the correct security group, so I associated the new instance with the old security group and it worked. I will need to explore why the new security group setting did not work.

Amazon creates key pairs for security in a .pem format. I use Putty and WinSCP to interact with the servers, so I needed a .ppk file. I used Puttygen to convert the .pem file to .ppk. I needed to install java to run the Minecraft server and initially installed the Oracle version. The Oracle version did not work, and subsequent research showed that this java version does no longer work with Minecraft. I then installed openjdk-17-jre and it worked. I was able to start the server and connect my local game to it.

Next step is to set up a Forge server on the new instance and set up some mods. My grandson is interested in the Security mod, so I will see if I can get that to work.