Setup Teamspeak 3 Server on Linux (CentOS)

If you run a gaming community, a Teamspeak 3 server is probably a popular choice for you to have for your players. If you don't want your server hosted remotely, don't want to pay extra for hosting specifically for Teamspeak, or just want to have access to your servers files, setting up a TS3 server on your own is the best option and is very easy to do.

First update all of your system packages. This isn't required but is good to do once in a while.

yum update -y

Next add a new system user to run the Teamspeak server under.

useradd teamspeak3

Set a password for the account.

passwd teamspeak3

Next give certain permissions for the user directory.

chmod 755 /home/teamspeak3

Now login to the new user we just made

su - teamspeak3

Now go into the home direcotry if you aren't already:

cd /home/teamspeak3

Download the Teamspeak 3 server files, the latest version as of writing this on 6.19.2015 is 3.0.11.3:

wget http://dl.4players.de/ts/releases/3.0.11.3/teamspeak3-server_linux-amd64-3.0.11.3.tar.gz

Now extract the archive:

tar -xvf teamspeak3-server*

Now enter the directory of the extracted contents:

cd teamspeak3-server*

Now run the initial runscript to generate the default configuration file for the Teamspeak 3 server:

./ts3server_minimal_runscript.sh createinifile=1

When you run the script above, a prompt will appear that will have your administration token key which is used to to get admin access once connected to your TS3 server. Once you have it copied and saved for future use, press CTRL + C to exit the prompt.

Now we should have a file named ts3server.ini in our directory, which is our configuration file. You can edit this file to set the IP address that you want your Teamspeak 3 server to bind to, which is what users will be connecting to. By default it is set to 0.0.0.0, which means it will try to bind to every IP address on your network interface.

Once you've made any configuration changes and saved them, you can run the following command to start the Teamspeak 3 server.

./ts3server_startscript.sh start

That's it! Now you can connect using the IP address of your server.

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