Since I've started out about a month ago, I've had a few people ask how I did certain things. That seems a little crazy to me since it's pretty much the blind leading the blind, but hey, if it helps anyone, then great! Anyone running a server today is building on such an insane pile of work done by others over the last decade or two that it's hard to even imagine.
A couple of weeks on NL was my first real experience with eqemu's, so when I say I'm a noob, I mean it. It was enough to give me the bug though, so when it shut down, I set up VoG the next day. Now I can't believe it took me this long to even be aware of what was possible and how much of a community is built up around it, but also how easy it actually is to get started. Especially that last part. Anyone that still loves EQ is probably too old to care, but running an emu server of your favorite game might be the best way to get into the game industry. What better way to prove that you can do a job than by actually doing it and dealing with player issues on a day to day basis? I've spent my time in the industry and won't be going back (at least not working for anyone else), but I REALLY wish that had occurred to me in my prime-eq-playing days. It would have saved me a LOT of time and money, one way or another.
So here's some stuff based on my experience, one month in. Maybe it'll be useful to someone. Maybe someone will pop in and tell me that something is a really stupid way of doing things, which is great since then maybe we'll all learn the right way :)
CAVEAT: DO NOT copy/paste any sql/code I ever post! And don't treat anything I say as the correct way to do anything! I just kick the server down the stairs over and over until the thing I want falls out. There are surely better ways to develop, but you won't learn them here! :) But having said that:
Starting out:
I basically followed this guide: http://wiki.eqemulator.org/p?EQEmu_on_D ... Virtualbox (Note, the text descriptions here diverge from the videos a little, I assume due to updates. I ignored the videos at first, then I had some issues. Some of these were fixed by following the videos instead.)
Except that I used a linux dedicated server instead of a virtual box. You can get one of those without spending too much if you shop around or an even cheaper VPS. Lots of the server advice seems geared towards windows since I think most people tend to start on their local machines. Digging through threads though, it sounds like people have had issues with Windows server stability, though that may not be the case with recent releases. Either way, I don't think I've had any stability problems at all with the remote linux server, except for things I've directly caused myself by doing something I shouldn't.
Note that most problems that I've solved have been by googling eqemu problemname so I haven't focused on things that were easily solved that way since they didn't cause me enough trouble to bother keeping track of. So always start there. However, one issue with trying to fix things is that googling a problem might give you a few hits that span back over the last decade. It can be tricky sometimes to find what's still relevant today.