Posts made by Chime

mysql> drop database thereach;

Yes. It is done.

I have archives of the wiki, the forum, the game, etc etc etc. Not sure there is interest but the archives exist and some of them can be safely posted (e.g. via bittorrent or the like).

As it stands, the forum content is only in the mysql dump and I don't imagine that is easy to extract in a useful form that doesn't have significant privacy violations. The complete wikistate from sql is present, but I will likely instead offer the mediawiki content xml export and a separate tar of the images. The content xml was somewhere around 4G of data but compressed to around 100M. The images with thumbnails mostly removed, etc., come out to about 4.5G. Final sqldump is about 1G. Game internal DB state, maildb and comsys have been archived via my git archive backuper thing, so I have detailed version history over time. No, not handing that out. Complete git archive (bare) for that is about 2.2G.

Realistically, any future flatfile of the reach game db would need to have users removed and quite likely a great deal more. I'm going to punt and for now say that the people that need that data should already have that data and go yell at fallcoast if you'd like more than that.

Q&A:

• But I was still using that!
  Okay. Go play somewhere else, now. The Reach was closed ages ago.

• But the wiki!!
  Realistically it spent most of its time locked because of the AbsenteeLandlord plugin that locks a wiki if no admins login. In any case, I have a relatively pre-sanitized mediawiki xml export and separate image tar that may suit your needs. Ask and I'll put that together.

• But the ICONS omg
  Yes, okay. I can see why lots of games would want access to the icons and didn't manage to copy them off before whatever. See this archive

@Pyrephox said:

I want more fictional cities, to be honest.

Good idea.

On the D&D side, I always wanted a campaign focused around the city of Sigil; a city set inside a pocket dimension shaped like a torus that connects to many worlds. Pair that sort of idea with some delightfully apocalyptic tendencies-- like the space is shrinking and buildings are slowly being smashed together while the people struggle to survive with nowhere else to go.

Of a similar shrinking-finite-space motif, the Everafter from the Hollows books; it was an anchored projection of the "real" world , subtly timeshifted but bound by the same day/night schedule and dragged along by the ley lines burned through the void by (spoiler spoiler spoiler)... Buildings constructed in the real world would eventually appear there, though shrunken and distorted and eternally crumbling. Between that and the "surface demons," most of the more civilized demons and their pets lived far beneath the surface, endlessly squabbling over ownership rights to their shrinking world.

The Kowloon Walled City, in the late 80s or early 90s. In 1987, the demolition was announced. Imagine how much more difficult the forced evictions of the 90s would have been if the residents included vampires and the like.

As others have said though, the details are critical for providing a reasonably diverse set of RP locations and solid sense of atmosphere. I don't think I have the data to provide the details.

When I hear the words Connection Machine, I usually think of something more like

@Thenomain said:

Do people still use Rhost?

It really does have some nice features. None of the mush implementations are completely better in all areas.

I recall peeking at Cybersphere (a moo) circa 1996; it was running on a 32bit sparcstation that had been upgraded to a formidable 32MB of ram, IIRC-- and they had only the binary of the moo server; the source with their needed customizations had been lost.

LET'S NOT DO THAT.

But more seriously: a phone would host a lot of these things fine. As would a Raspberry Pi and similar things.

@Cobaltasaurus

Hmmmm. public makes it accessible outside the class, rather than just inside. Good. void makes it return nothing. Good. () after the name means it takes no parameters. Good.

But without static, it's an instance method-- that is, you'd need to invoke it on an object of the class holding that method. If you want it to work without having an instance of that class, it'd be a public static void, much like the traditional main.

Also... the . after println seems very odd to me. Best recommendation: try compiling it and watch what happens. Never hand anything in without trying it.

@Thenomain Well. My mechanipus branch of tinymux will auto-reconnect sql as needed... see
this commit if you want to try it in isolation...

Otherwise, set up a ~/.my.cnf file with something like:

[client]
user=gamename
password=...
database=gamename

and then a ~/wait-for-sql.sh like:

#! /bin/bash
while ! echo 'select distinct "sql is up";' |mysql; do sleep 1; done

and then be sure to set it executable

$ chmod 755 wait-for-sql.sh

and then edit your crontab (cron -e) to have something like:

@reboot wait-for-sql.sh && cd /home/mush/gamename/game && ./Startmux

or if you're on my fork something like

@reboot wait-for-sql.sh && cd /home/mush/gamename/game && bin/mux-start

menacing helpfulness intensifies

@Derp said:

That was fast. It appears to be back up.

Yay. When things work right, it goes pretty fast. The big problem I have is when people log in and move stuff around but don't update the shell cron @reboot line to point to their game.

Everything on kuu (空, Sky) that should be running is running; kuramori (暗森, Dark forest) is mostly back except for one game and they're better off starting that one themselves.

Midori (緑, Green) was recently rebooted for various assorted (or sordid) updates, and doesn't actually host games, so that's fine too.

And I'm heading to the airport in another 90 minutes to head home. woot!

@Arkandel said:

Those demons aren't going to grind themselves, you know.

That brings to my mind an entirely different-- and not entirely unwelcome-- image of what activities might be involved therein. ^-^

@HelloRaptor said: (paraphrased mildy)

First Poster
That rant was all bullshit.
Third Poster
Nay, that's certain:
We are blest soapbox is rid of it.
Second Poster
Peace! let us hear what yon Raptor can say.
HELLORAPTOR
You mother fuckers --
Citizens
Peace, ho! let us hear him.
HELLORAPTOR
Friends, MUSHers, Shang rejects, lend me your eyes;
I come to bury the forum, not to praise it.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with lost back'ps;
So let it be with SoapBox. The noble Glitch, he
Hath told you RP was kinda fun:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously have we all answer'd it.

Okay, no, I'm not really sure where I was going with that. Anyway. Raptor, you're an asshole for hating that a forum caters to others' tastes. We're assholes for disliking your dislike. We'll miss you either way. Have fun out there, you bastard.

Remember, this is tonight; 18 hours to go for kuu and 20 hours for kuramori.

Linode is scheduling all machines for downtime to address new Xen
vulnerabilities. This mean reboot:

kuu.mechanipus.com
2015-10-22 5:00:00 AM UTC, aka
2015-10-21 10:00:00 PM PDT, aka
2016-10-22 1:00:00 AM EDT, aka
"Wednesday night"

kuramori.mechanipus.com
2015-10-22 7:00:00 AM UTC, aka
2015-10-22 12:00:00 AM PDT, aka
2015-10-22 3:00:00 AM EDT, aka
"Wednesday night"

Outage windows are scheduled at two hours, but may be considerably
less. These machines should automatically restart and most games
should shutdown before and autostart afterward correctly without any
additional details.

If you have problems, please don't panic. I'll be traveling for work
and mostly inaccessible until late Thursday evening-- possibly Friday.

See http://status.linode.com/incidents/ltchxw3jmx0s for "more" information.

@HelloProject said:

So, I wanted to have a bit of a constructive discussion about things that are commonly held as difficult or impossible to explore in a MUing environment. Obviously anyone can say "This is why you can't do that", but I would like people to think of things that people believe cannot be done, and then think of ways that they possibly could be.

Like McMannis said in The Usual Suspects, "There's nothing that cannot be done."

A notable example of something considered difficult or impossible to do non-destructively in a MU is time travel. Sure, there are examples of staff controlled time travel (String Theory, which is a Heroes MU, Mega Man MUSH, where we went back in time and met Street Fighter people in the 90s). However, time travel is still highly regulated. Mega Man MUSH handles time travel by simply saying that it creates an alternate universe rather than altering the present, but again, it's staff controlled.

Time travel complicates or eliminates causality. As causality is often the only tangible evidence that your characters mattered, this very quickly becomes pretty ugly.

They can dick around in history, they just can't change it, thanks to causal loops.
I know that the grandfather paradox is a thing, but I would ultimately override it with causal loops. "You killed Hitler! Holy shit!"
"Hey why did Nazis still happen?"
"Oh, I guess Hitler was never actually the original Hitler, but a double", and so on.

This very quickly becomes silly an degenerates to a case of whack-a-mole that can never actually hit the right mole. Not fun.

That said, I think time-travel issues could be very well handled if certain limited short-range forms were a standard part of the setting.

Kim Harrison (of The Hollows fame) has a new series out involving "drafters" -- people that can draft new timelines. Essentially, they can rewind time in a localized region of space by some number of seconds or minutes. For example; I've been shot! -- rewind time 30 seconds and kick the gun out of his hand before he can do that! ... It's very difficult and has terrible costs and psychological results, especially to memory. Indeed, she apparently wrote it to explore some of the social implications of Alzheimer's and related memory issues; the drafters need an Anchor that can help them stabilize on a coherent memory of the winning timeline.

This could make for a very interesting setting. I highly recommend reading at least the short story she put out in advance, "Sideswiped." Unfortunately, it being science fiction instead of urban fantasy with hawt vampires, elves, werewolves, and demons, the sales have been catastrophically bad. It really is fantastic writing though...

@Alzie said:

Since it's been brought up several times, Security through Obscurity is a perfectly fine, viable solution as long as it's not your only security layer. Changing the default port of SSH or any other service will never stop a targeted attack, however as an additional layer of security, it will defeat the non-targeted attacks that are employed regularly that look for a specific opened port.

Additionally, Services like fail2ban or sshguard have their own issues, such as someone recognizing that they are being employed and locking you out of your own server. They're not particularly good solutions given that danger unless you have local access to the server.

Please forgive a bit of thread necromancy, but I just saw this.

Security by obscurity is generally pretty stupid. Running ssh on another port doesn't hide it from very many people and is pretty annoying to the rest of us.

Correctly configured fail2ban should be generating ip-localized rules in response to auth failures. If Attacker A on address ip-A hammers ssh trying to get in as root, fail2ban should block ip-A on port 22 (and maybe other ports). Even if they know my username and hammer that, it only blocks it for the IPs they come from.

Now if they can spoof IPs (not all that hard), then things get more complicated, but usually that results in other problems first.

Source: Me! I've run mechanipus in various forms for several years and AccelaNET before it. I'm quite familiar with operating on the internet at large and in distinctly hostile network environments (woo, DEFCON!). All of my machines run fail2ban and have for many years. Additionally I have a variety of adaptive firewall rules constructed using rate-limiting hash buckets, which tend to make portscanners unusable. I can elaborate on how that works if anyone is interested--

-- but that's part of my point exactly: none of my security relies on obscurity. It's strong without it and spreading knowledge about how it works only raises the strength of internet users as a whole. For the safety of everyone, we must all know how these things work.

...Geez I sound like the Free Council now.

I can try to help, but as Glitch says, probably better to take it to that forum.

I'm really not a Java expert though; haven't used it seriously since 1.1/1.2 era. Public static void main is apparently still a thing though, so I probably have a valid set of basics, even if annotations are new and bizarre looking. Java will probably always be "that odd scripting language that people use for modding cool stuff into Minecraft" to me, but hey, there we go.

n.b.: you're much better off finding someone who is an enthusiastic user of Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA, or similar IDEs. I've poked at them but I tend to curmugeonously stick to Emacs.

@Jaunt said:

One of the biggest issues with older MU* Engines is their restrictive licensing.
Most older engines do not allow them to be used for the purpose of creating for-profit games. Evennia does not have that restriction.

Independent of the "discussion" above, I think this freer licensing is a good thing. I've met Stallman, and it was a wonderfully reaffirming moment for my preference toward BSD/MIT/etc style licensing.

RHost had a fairly restrictive model a while back-- with an NDA required, etc. Once you talk to them though, they were pretty friendly and really only wanted to establish proper attribution, which is a good thing to do in any case.

As for a run-down of modern MUSH-family licensing, see the licensing markdown file in my mux fork for details. In rough summary, most of the code bases have borrowed very heavily from each other and have code lineage going back to the original tinymud and concept lineage dating back to PDP-10 era Muddle and the like. (36bit mainframes ftw!) Artistic License seems to be the standard there.

Artistic License regrettably may prohibit certain types of commercial activity. Relicensing code that has copyrights and contributions from large numbers of users over many decades isn't feasible. BUT we can certainly talk about lessons learned and how we can use those ideas to make newer technologies better.

In general though, the big advantage of a python-based mu system is... python. No one who has looked at mushcode, muf/mpi, moocode, etc can seriously disagree.

can we all please just get along ._.

I've used RCS, CVS, TLA (arch), Darcs (and used to be a supplier of magically statically linked solaris sparc binaries because of the trouble others have with Haskell), hg, bzr, svn... I think that's about it.

I really did like Darcs, but the way they don't-handle branches by making you just use additional repos for branching is awkward to me. Git feels like the best of all worlds.

"Back in my day, we had to commit our changes five miles through the snow..."