June 7th, 2009 — OpenSim
It has been about a year since I wrote about my experience with TribalNet, a web application that was based on OpenSim. TribalNet allowed end users to bring their own computing power to a virtual world grid that operated on the principle of peer-to-peer.
My experience with TribalNet taught me that my router suffered from an apparently incurable problem known as “NAT Bounce.” When Network Address Translation (NAT) works properly, traffic from the internet is forwarded to specific programs running on specific computers within the Local Area Network (LAN). When NAT goes wrong, certain types of messages fail to arrive at their destination, which can cause subtle but insurmountable problems.
I tried to get around the problem by reconfiguring the way my router performed port forwarding. Following the instructions given on the portforward website, I assigned a static IP Address to my PC, and then configured my router to forward the relevant ports to it. This work-around allowed me to connect my own private sim, running on my home computer, to the TribalNet grid, where other people could visit it. But due to Nat Bounce, I myself was unable to enter my own sim!
That failure discouraged me from going further with OpenSim. The reconfiguration of my router caused problems for the computers of other family members connected to my home router, so I set the router back to the default configuration. My attention was diverted elsewhere, and this blog fell victim to comment spam. (I recently activated the Askimet plugin to counter that.) Meanwhile, TribalNet itself went out of business.
Thus ended Act One of my OpenSim experience.
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November 8th, 2008 — Spam
This blog is currently dormant, for reasons explained on another one of my blogs. See my post Boom and Bust for the story of how my Internet habit evolved into an addiction, prompting me to go cold turkey for a while.
I’m cautiously coming back online, mainly to do minimal maintenance upkeep on my different websites, blogs and social networks. I’ve been planning to do a post here about how I’d like to extend this blog’s coverage to the entire realm of Open Source, including but going beyond OpenSim, which is only one particularly fascinating branch of the Open Source phenomenon.
But for the moment a different concern bothers me. I’m referring to the problem of comment spam.
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June 30th, 2008 — OpenSim
I first learned about TribalNet by reading a post on UgoTrade’s blog. As UgoTrade explains, TribalNet is a new web application based on OpenSim and which introduces a key innovation: the decentralized grid. The end users bring their own computing power to a grid made up of whoever happens to be connected at the moment, in the spirit of peer-to-peer.
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June 22nd, 2008 — OpenSim
How would you like a whole sim to play around with, all for yourself, and totally free?
Astonishing as it sounds, this is already possible. There are just a few major limitations. You must settle for using the OpenSim software package, which still lacks a great many functions, when compared to all that you can do in Second Life. You must also put on your “do-it-yourself” hat, and be prepared to hack your way through the tough spots. And to start with, you must settle for being all alone on your self-contained little sim, because connecting your sim to a grid on the Internet is a much more complicated affair.
Running OpenSim in standalone mode on your home computer turns out to be remarkably easy to implement. All you have to do is download a pre-compiled executable binary version of the OpenSim program, install it on your computer, start it up, and run through a few simple configuration command lines. Here is how I did it.
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March 23rd, 2008 — Uncategorized
(Note: this post was extensively rewritten on June 21st, 2008.)
Danton Sideways is my avatar in Second Life. Danton’s adventures in Second Life are told in my blog on Blogger, which can be found here:
http://dantonsideways.blogspot.com
One day in February 2008, when I tried to connect to Danton’s blog on Blogger, my Kaspersky firewall blocked the web page. As I tell in a post called Blogger Blowout, this upsetting bug made me want to move my blog, and I created this Wordpress blog for that purpose. But a few days after I had installed and activated the Wordpress software, my local French web hosting service had a massive blowout that took them offline for more than 24 hours straight. Meanwhile Blogger fixed the bug that caused my firewall to block the site, so I decided to leave Danton’s main blog in Blogger Beatitude.
I then thought I might use this wordpress blog to make a backup copy of my Second Life blog, just in case I accidentally deleted the other one, or something like that. But I never used this blog for that either, and it has just been sitting inactive ever since.
Until today, when I’ve found a new purpose for this blog. As I tell on my main blog, I recently took a tour of the Open Source grids. Following that tour I began to seriously study the Open Source grid tools, and to fool around with both the OpenSim software and the libsecondlife protocol. I now want to start chronicling my adventures in the realm of Open Source, but I would prefer to keep this apart from my chronicle of Danton’s adventures in Second Life. So welcome to Danton’s Open Source Blog.