Opinion from Community

[AndMetal]

Originally Posted by trevius

The whole concept of this idea would be to have dual LS capability for server. People would set their server to connect to the public LS just like normal (though, that would be optional and not required if you just wanted to use the Private one). Then, they would also set it to use the Private LS running on their own server and using their own accounts database at the same time. Ideally, servers would be connected to both all of the time. But, in the case that the Public LS goes down for any reason, their players could then change their eqhost.txt to point to the private one for that particular server. Also, if people wanted to avoid the Public LS even when it was up, they would still be able to use just the Private LS for that particular server since they would both be connected at all times.

The private LS wouldn't use the LS account ID numbers like the Public one does. Authentication for the private LS would ignore the "lsaccount_id" field completely since it would have no way of knowing what it should be. Instead, it would use the password field when people log into their private LS and then just forward any accounts that pass the authentication check at that point straight to the server as authenticated. That is it.

I second.

I think it would be good to have an option to turn off the "public" part of it for those who either just want to play on a LAN, or just don't want to be connected to the public login server (either in the short term during development, or in the long term for whatever reasons).

I think ideally it would be best to incorporate this into world, but we'd need to keep the crypto out of the source (.dll, .so, etc) so others can't just start packet sniffing client authentication & reverse the username/password hash.

Originally Posted by image

I see what we are getting at with the shared LS, we would need a way to generate UNIQUE id's that way, sort of like how everquest has those item id tags.

The reason I say this is, if I have LSID account 1 on my public server (which we obviously do), the private server would have LSID 1 of a different user. The Login server uses the LSID to identify and pass. Yes you can setup a private password with #setpass if they have the tables meshed in the same database, but the LSID would still be an issue.

So I think this would require a bit of re-work.

Edit: The reason I want unique LSID's is there still are a lot of database functions/calls that use the LSID and this would cause problems with login and world.

I think if we change to use the id rather than the lsaccount_id from the account table, that should help clear that up. Then, if an account authenticates via the public login server instead, we can update the lsaccount_id column with the info, but still use the local id.

After brief digging into the world source, I wasn't able to determine how dependent we are on the lsaccount_id, so I'm not really sure how difficult of a change this would be.

[trevius]

Image, if your last post that mentioned "shared LS" was a reply about my idea, then I still don't think you are understanding the idea. There would be no sharing of the Login Server. There would be a public (optional) Login Server connection and also a private (unshared and also optional) mini-login-like connection.

Here is a simple example of how it could work:

[Client]--->[Public Login Server]--->[Authenticate to Public LS Database]--->[Server]

Or

[Client]--->[Private Login Server]--->[Authenticate to Server's Account Table]--->[Server]

No sharing involved :P

[image]

I don't think I am able to express the design limitations of this to you, so I am just going to leave it at that.

[KingMort]

Well folks you know my stance .. Have gained heated discussion in other topics..

I 100% support EQEMU but everyone knows that the Eqemu staff may resolve to go open source... and maybe they don't... that's fine too.....


This is no time to lose confidence the team is making MUCH PROGRESS .....

Funds will be given and things will move forward as always...

REMEMBER we are a community... and we must NOT split up by any means .....

I don't care what happens to my own server as long as we pull together in these hard times...

Do not make the mistake to totally disregard Eqemu.... Do not make the mistake to totally disregard other options...

I strongly believe that KLS and Doodman and the other team members will pull through this.. However it's good that folks have been working on other options...

KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK !!!

King

[PathToEternity]

I've been watching this thread (as well as others over the last few days) and thought I'd share an idea. I'd be interested in the thoughts of others on something like this.

How about having a very simple launcher program?

I am not a big fan of launchers, but have been rolling this idea around in my head.

We could have a simple (and I am stressing simplicity, though no need for it to look shoddy) launcher program. You would run the launcher instead of the shortcut, and it would open up showing a list of servers. The servers would list from two separate sources. First, they could be manually added (server ops can give the ip/port of their private LS); second, eqemulator.net would host a downloadable file (not just real time gathered information) which would list all the servers (as in, servers with submitted server info) and this could be updated from within the launcher (download a small text file, for example). So, based on the personal list and the public list, all the servers you have ip/port info for would show on this list.

Obviously a server which is down/not operating would say as much on the server list.

Hopefully, the private LS information can not only report to the launcher whether the server is up or down, but also current population. Thus, based on the list of servers from both the personal and public lists, we could mimic the client's server list. Of course, because these would be private LS's, the username and password would/could vary from server to server, and that would have to be entered within the client later.

This puts the power in the hands of the user as to what servers he wants to keep up with/connect to, while not divorcing him from the EQEmu community because of the (optionally downloaded) public server list.

I'm at work right now, so can't come up with a nice picture to explain, but basically the idea I have is an interface with a listing of the servers, a button to download the latest EQEmu server list (but all using private LS now), a button to manually add a private LS, and of course a button to launch the game (eqgame patchme).

Additionally, with a little more work, perhaps it would be possible for servers which use custom files to use the launcher to swap files in and out on the fly, but that is probably wading out a little deeper than my mind is willing to go.

Anyway, if this idea is worthless and nothing can be done with it, so be it. Otherwise, I have always wanted (and I think I speak for the community) to see something which allows EQEmu to continue on, even if the public LS is down (temporarily or, God forbid, indefinitely). And sorry for so many parentheses, but seemed unavoidable.