Best Advice
 

So, it's finally the weekend. Enough time to actually sit down and get working on setting up my own server to experiment with. I am asking for a little help, due to the numerous guides and set up walk throughs that vary in date posted.

To start, I have a PC with 2 OS installed on different partitions. Win7 x64 on one, and Server 2008 x64 on the other.
- Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700 @ 2.66GHz CPU
- 8.0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 533MHz RAM
- 512MB GeForce 9800 GTX/9800 GTX+ (XFX Pine Group) x2 [SLI Enabled]
- 976.76GB Western Digital WDC WD10 01FALS-00J7B SCSI Disk Device (SCSI)

I initially wanted to install the server on Win7, and ultimately uninstall that server 2008 partition all together. This was a bit of time ago, back when I frequented EZ server. Sadly I failed in this venture, and was so disgruntled I just quit. I had a lot of feed back and suggestions, but none ever seemed to help. Last night I used http://www.eqemulator.net/wiki/wikka.php?wakka=Windows guide, finished it up this morning but had errors at the very end of set up. I think this was a more aggravating blow than the first time, just because I was so close.

Obviously I'm not blaming the guides for my failure to get this working, but I would like to know if anyone has posted (and i just didn't see it) a guide that:
A. Is meant for either Win Server 2008 (2003), or Win 7
B. Is for a custom server, I believe I saw a few mention being for just EQ as its initially set up. Could be wrong in this though
C. Has the SoD release in mind. I imagine it doesn't matter when the guide says "install EQ Titanium" and I just replace it with Seeds... But in the back of my mind I wonder if its whats causing the errors possibly.

I attempted to patch a few guides together, but even then there is a difference in software used between guides (some use Minilogin, Navicat, Tortoise SVN, Heidi SQL, etc..) . I hate to seem so helpless, but I would much rather ask the questions now and hope someone has been in this boat before, than just give up.

Thank you in advance for any assistance :)

For a minilogin setup Titanium and SoF are interchangable in the guides but SoD is not as the opcodes.conf is different.

SoD opcodes.conf
That change is only needed for minilogin when using SoD/Underfoot.

This is the problem with SO many people, if something gets hard they just think o well Im not meant to do that anyway. The difference between those people and the people running servers now are that the people running servers just stuck it out. There is no lottery to determine who gets to set up a server.

Also if you in the course of 24 hours you get to the point of wanting to give up then you will be running into the same issue after your server is running. I guess people think that once the server is up and running then all the headaches are over but that's so far from the truth. If you don't have the patience to set up a server(regardless if it takes you 1 day or 7) then you will run into serious issues trying to troubleshoot a complex NPC script or god forbid any source changes you may have made.

The key to success(in all of life really) is persistence. You may lose interest briefly but that doesnt mean to scrap everything.

Also if you want help with problems, you need to give information. You give all these cool stats about your server comp(which are entirely irrelevant to this post) but then simply say that you ran into errors near the end of the guide. How exactly is somebody supposed to give you feedback based on that?

Ultimately there is no difference if you are running an XP server or Win7 or Vista server besides the fact you need to run things as administrator, and likewise with what version of EQ is installed on the server box. I've run SoD zones on a server that only had titanium installed.

Also there is no 'locked off' version, so when you asked about custom servers its a weird question. When you change shit in your DB, that makes your server custom and is in no way related to any problems setting up your server. If you are asking about editing the source code, I would say focus on getting a server running, do other basic shit first(since you seem pretty new to this) and then later after you get more confident, start getting into compiling your own source.

Follow the guide you linked, ignore all the minilogin shit and you will be fine. If not, then ask specific questions.

I appreciate the help you both offer.

Blackdragon, I didnt know there was a different config for SoD client. Thanks for posting this for me.

Caryatis, I have no intentions of just giving up. I did before, just because it was so close to baby's birth and figured I would just scrap it and pick it up once things fell back into a "norm".
I didn't post anything about the error messages, just because I wanted to ensure there wasn't something hardware/ OS related I didn't know about that may cause issues before I even started. Now knowing that OS really doesnt make a difference at all, then I will just delete the server 2008 partition and work straight from Win7, allowing me to do daily things while learning a thing or two about the server.
What I meant by the custom server stuff was, I remember reading in one of the guides something to the effect of "This guide is meant for setting up an 'out of the box' server, and if you want to customize it you should seek another guide".. This is why I asked if there was more than one way to install, and if it affected the way it would be operated/ changed.
I will start fresh on the guide again, ensuring I didn't do something wrong along the way and post specific errors if any this time around.
On a related note however, you said to ignore the minilogin portion... If i do that, is there a replacement program I should use? Or is it optional to begin with?

Honestly 99% of people should never even bother with minilogin, it causes more headaches than it solves by far(just have a look around at all the threads asking why it doesnt matter what login information people use, they all log into the same account).

There is no need to do anything, just set up your server.bat file(not including any of the minilogin stuff) and then run that(it will launch your world.exe and the zone.exe) which is all you need running to have a server functional. This will use the eqemu login server.

Sounds super, thanks for the advice Caryatis