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EricL's FTP IM + my attempt to save it for what is worth

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Botsareus:
I cannot really see why EricL FTP based IM was abandoned other then security concerns.

If there are other reasons please do tell.

Also, is there any way to give each user a unique username and password? That in combination with not letting people mess with the source code should eliminate any security issues. I think.

Any ideas?

Numsgil:
At the time my concerns were:

1.  There's no way to limit the size of the directory the FTP dumps to on the server.  If the server runs out of disk space, Bad Things(tm) happen.  And we usually only figure it out after the fact.

2.  It doesn't scale well to lots and lots of users.

3.  It probably was against the terms and conditions of our server.

Now, I was not and am not a webdev, so these things might not be true!  Especially at the time I didn't understand Linux very well at all, which made it frustrating to do anything on the server, and when Eric was around we were using a hosting service (GoDaddy).  Now that we have our own server linuxbox, we can pretty much do whatever we want.  And I've certainly grown as a programmer over the last few years and since I started working at Google I've had to become more adept at linux stuff.

So, thinking about it now, we might be able to limit the size of the FTP folder using this method.  I'll try to dick around with it at some point in the next month maybe.

On the scaling issue, there might be some cleverness the clients can do to make it less of an issue.  And certainly it's not something we have to worry about if the number of simulations is counted in the dozens.  I think the FTP protocol itself is certainly capable of scaling up enough for our needs.

...

I think we can tie in the FTP accounts with forum accounts, so we can be at least be sure if something gets abused who to blame.  That I'm less sure of, as it would require some magic to connect the forum database with the FTP logins, which I think might be tied to system users.

...

If you want to start playing around with setting up a FTP based IM again, I'll see if I can get things kosher for it on the server.

Botsareus:
It is good to know that this may actually work  8)

I am not there yet as I have not started applying the exploit fixes yet.

I mainly asked to make sure I have a backup plan incase my attempt to port does not work.

Also we will need to figure out the whole open source thing. I am really not sure if we should let users mess with the source while connected to IM.
  For example:

 I was thinking of an IM mode where no 'repopulating' robots allowed. This IM is restricted not to teleport anything if there are not enough plants reproducing. The reason it is restricted is to not have fruitflys kill everything on all servers without letting enough self-sustaining plants teleport. If we let a user mess with code, the user can simply comment out this rule. We may catch this user in the act but the damage will be done. I.e. Say hello to unrestricted fruitfly starving itself after killing everything in IM.

Botsareus:

--- Quote ---If you want to start playing around with setting up a FTP based IM again, I'll see if I can get things kosher for it on the server.
--- End quote ---

Numsgil, what do you think of my idea of not having future versions of DB open source?

Also I think I can call it something more funky then "DB2.5"

Peter:
The FTP username/password shouldn't be in the sourcecode, rather in something like a property file which is not commited with the sourcecode, but does contain the credentials. So anyone without the password running it just from source can't use IM.

What are the security issues in the FTP solution of EricL?

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