Ok so am I just a newb or what, to run smaug in the background so that that user can log out it should be like ./startup & right? If that still doesn't really keep it from exiting when the user disconnects from the server itself, is there something needed make sure this works?

Usually this:

nohup ./startup &

The nohup literally tells it not to hang up when you disconnect.

Hrm, even if I do that ti still seems to exit out regardless of what I am doing… hrm.

Edit: Ok so apparently I had to use sudo nohup ./startup & to get it to work… Hrm I have more reading to do I guess… Thanks though

Wait. Are you saying it's dying when you log out of your shell, or is it dying when someone else disconnects from the game?

When the user logs out from shell, the process would die. Using sudo nohup ./startup & got to to stay after the user disconnects from shell.

So you decided to run it as root?

You really don't want to be running it as root.

If you're using zsh as your shell, try typing "disown" after starting the script: that instructs the shell to not kill off the background process upon exiting.

Shouldn't using the nohup command have done the same as telling it to disown anyway? It's always worked like that for me, even on non-Redhat based systems.

Different shells implement their own behavior. I've had cases where zsh made me use disown, although it's possible I have something misconfigured.

EDIT: to be clear, I mean the actual shell program, and not the somewhat colloquial meaning that "shell" == "ssh'ing into the system".