Big day of patches: six game servers, and the bug that stopped custom domains ever getting a certificate
Posted by tomspark
Busy day. Here's everything that went out, in plain English. The big one: custom domains couldn't get an SSL certificate. At all. If you tried setting up a custom domain (or a public address for Hearth) and it failed with something vague about Nginx Proxy Manager, this was why: SparkBox set up its web proxy with a placeholder email address ending in .local, and Let's Encrypt flatly refuses those. So every certificate request died at the very first step — before your domain was even looked at — and the error pointed at completely the wrong thing. That's fixed. Setting up a public address now asks for your email (Let's Encrypt requires one; it's only used to warn you before a certificate expires) and puts it where the certificate tool actually reads it. I verified this on a live box, not just in theory. Two related fixes came with it: - If a first attempt failed halfway, the web address had already been created — so every retry after that came back "couldn't add that domain" forever. SparkBox now recognises its own half-finished setup and tells you exactly what it found and what to do, instead of a dead end. - In the new dashboard, errors from that window showed up as things like "http502" instead of the actual explanation. You get the real sentence now. Game servers: one to six You lot clearly love hosting game servers, so the catalogue grew: - Minecraft Bedrock — the Minecraft on phones, tablets and the default Windows app. The existing Game Servers app is Java only, which is why some of your kids' devices could never join. This closes that gap. About 1GB, no Realm subscription. - Project Zomboid — co-op survival that keeps ticking between sessions. Join and admin passwords generated for you. Fair warning: first start downloads about 7GB, so make a cup of tea. - Factorio, Valheim, Terraria — all one-click, all with passwords handled where the game supports them. Every one has a proper setup guide now, including the bit most guides skip: exactly which port to forward and whether it's UDP or TCP. They're all under Guides on the site, and each app links to its own. Game traffic deliberately doesn't go through your VPN, by the way — your friends need a stable address to connect to. That's by design, not an oversight. Dashboard fixes - The new dashboard's Updates page never actually ran a scan — it only showed the result of the overnight check. On boxes where that hadn't run, it said "All apps are up to date" and the per-app Update buttons never appeared. It scans properly now, and "Check for updates" checks your apps as well as SparkBox itself. - Hearth can be set up entirely inside the new dashboard. It used to send you back to the classic one. There's also now a "How it's reached" option on those apps so you can change or remove an address later. - Tom AI: when it ran something but couldn't confirm the result afterwards, it repeated itself and took ages to say so. Says it once, straight away. Update from the Updates page, or your box will pick it all up overnight on its own. As always — if something here doesn't match what you're seeing, say so in this thread. Several of these came straight from your reports today. --- Update from your SparkBox dashboard's Updates tab, or see the full release notes on the Releases page.