OpenSim, Act Two

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.

Now a year later, I’m back. It seems that personal projects on the Internet often go into a phase of extended hibernation. Then suddenly one day they wake up again, and take up where they left off.

A while ago I decided to try again to publish my own sim on the Internet, using OpenSim. Because of the failure I had in trying to reconfigure my router, I instead opted for renting a server from a hosting service. After asking a few questions on the opensim channel on freenode, I decided to rent a Windows Server, rather than a Linux server. Again, my reasoning was that it would be easier, since I am more familiar with the Windows operating system – my first steps with OpenSim had after all been carried out on my own Windows PC.

I chose to rent a kimsufi dedicated Windows 2003 Server, from the French web hosting company OVH. The package costs me 30 Euros/month for the server, plus 15 Euros/month to rent the Windows operating system.

I started by fooling around a bit with the server, in order to get more familiar with how to use it. Then I installed on the server the same OpenSim binaries that I had successfully used in Standalone mode on my home computer. I ran the executable file, and the console opened and launched the initial setup, allowing me to name my avatar and choose the password.

I then created a short-cut to connect the Second Life viewer on my home computer to the OpenSim running on my server. When I tried to connect, to my great disappointment I got a message saying: “Login failed. Could not authenticate your avatar.”

I Googled the problem, and was surprised by the relative scarcity of mentions. Vint Falken seems to have had the same problem when creating a standalone sim on a Windows XP – which was solved by simply creating a new user. I tried that, but my second avatar was rejected the same as the first.

I found several posts that suggested deactivating the Firewall. I went ahead and completely deactivated the Windows Firewall on my server. But when I tried to connect to my sim I still got the message: “could not authenticate your avatar.”

So the curtain comes up on Act Two of my OpenSim adventure, revealing major problems. It looks like the road is going to be rocky.