Trying to run a personal server, need help!

[zippermikey]

Hello everyone! I have been playing Minecraft since like February 2011 and I love the game with my entire being. However, I have never gotten into the multiplayer aspect of it. I have been trying to get my friends to play it for ages but they are Call of Duty this and World of Warcraft that. Finally my brother got back from the Army a week ago and today he decided to give the game a go. So I decided to try and run my own server, since we don't wish to play with others besides just us 2.

Well i got the server running just fine(as far as I know anyway, it pretty set it up by itself), and after some minor hiccups of teaching him Minecraft 101, we were have a blast. Then suddenly I ran into a major issue. I was underground and digging, and all of the sudden, I it an area that it would not break. I could hiot it all I wanted with my pickaxe but the area would not break no matter what I did. I called my brother over and he tried to break it as well and the rock just doesn't break. We said heck with it and just went and dug elsewhere. Then I came upon antoher rock that would not break, and another, and another. This happened in quite a few different areas. We keep hitting these unbreakable rock areas. And yes the rocks are normal rocks.

Is this maybe something I need to configure on the server? Like i said, I did not configure the server. All I did was download the server thing from the technic site and ran it and started the server. I got the basic commands down like saving the server using save-all and stuff. Am I doing something wrong? Is there stuff I am gonna have to learn? Help! My brother just got home and I really want this to be enjoyable for him. We can keep digging around these undiggable areas if necessary I suppose, but if there is a fix please help! Also, could someone give me some basic info on running a server? I tried to read the posts that were stickied but I don;t understand much of it. They pretty much assume you have a basic understanding of running servers and I don't.

[DragnHntr]

Is it near the spawn point? The chunk you spawn in is protected on servers, you cannot mine out the blocks by default. I believe you can dig them out if you make yourself an OP.

[zippermikey]

Yeah thats what it was thank you! I figured out how to make us op and that solved it. Thanks again my good sir! Also, does anyone know if there is more creepers than normal when you are playing multiplayer? I swear we've been getting like 5 times the normal amount. They are everywhere lol. At first it was funny now its just getting annoying. Any way to adjust that?

[AlienX]

Just a small FYI on this one.

Inside your bukkit.yml file is a spawn-radius setting, changing this to 0 will disable the spawn protection allowing your players to build there who are not opped.