How to Set Up a TeamSpeak Server on Ubuntu 16.04

TeamSpeak is a free and very popular voice communications application for real-time voice chat over the internet. TeamSpeak uses a very low amount of bandwidth and it is mostly used by gamers that are chatting with each other while playing a game, to avoid latency issues. All users need a client installed on their devices and a central server that all the clients connect to.

This tutorial explains how to install TeamSpeak server on an Ubuntu 16.04 VPS.

Log in to your Ubuntu 16.04 VPS as user root

ssh root@IP_address -p port_number

and make sure your system is up to date by executing the following command

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

You can also enable automatic updates.

Create a new system user with disabled login for TeamSpeak, so that the application can run under this user.

adduser --disabled-login teamspeak

Adding new group `teamspeak' (1000) ...
Adding new user `teamspeak' (1000) with group `teamspeak' ...
Creating home directory `/home/teamspeak' ...
Copying files from `/etc/skel' ...
Changing the user information for teamspeak
Enter the new value, or press ENTER for the default
Full Name []:
Room Number []:
Work Phone []:
Home Phone []:
Other []:
Is the information correct? [Y/n]

You can leave all fields for user information blank.

Next step, is to download TeamSpeak. Go to their official website and download the latest stable release of TeamSpeak Server. At the moment of writing this article, it is version 3.0.13.6

cd /usr/local
wget http://dl.4players.de/ts/releases/3.0.13.6/teamspeak3-server_linux_amd64-3.0.13.6.tar.bz2

Once it is downloaded, unpack the archive and rename the TeamSpeak directory to something simpler.

tar -jxvf teamspeak3-server_linux_amd64-3.0.13.6.tar.bz2
mv teamspeak3-server_linux_amd64 teamspeak

Make the newly created user an owner of the TeamSpeak files

chown -R teamspeak:teamspeak /usr/local/teamspeak

Startup script is included in the files, so we will create a symbolic link

ln -s /usr/local/teamspeak/ts3server_startscript.sh /etc/init.d/teamspeak

and run the following command to make the TeamSpeak server automatically start on boot time:

update-rc.d teamspeak defaults

Finally, start the TeamSpeak server:

service teamspeak start

To check if TeamSpeak is actually running, run the following command

service teamspeak status

● teamspeak.service
Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/teamspeak; bad; vendor preset: enabled)
Active: active (running) since Sun 2017-05-21 20:26:32 CDT; 1min 12s ago
Docs: man:systemd-sysv-generator(8)
Process: 13214 ExecStart=/etc/init.d/teamspeak start (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
CGroup: /system.slice/teamspeak.service
└─13218 ./ts3server

Here you will also find the username, password, and a privilege key. You will need this information to manage your server.

Of course, you don’t have to do any of this if you use one of our TeamSpeak Server Hostingservices, in which case you can simply ask our expert Linux admins to install TeamSpeak on your server for you. They are available 24×7 and will take care of your request immediately.

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