I am brainstorming an educational project and foresee a few major issues that need answers before I can proceed farther. I have not found answers in the Knowledge Base and the contact points provided in the help files refer me back to the Knowledge Base. So here I am, hoping that someone can provide some answers since the Lindens haven't provided any.
The first issue is which firewall ports need to be open in order to establish a connection between the client and Linden's servers. The Knowledge base article on configuring a firewall says to open the ports listed above, but there are no ports listed. Since we use a hardware firewall, there is no way to treat the SL client as a trusted application and must manually open specific ports.
The second issue concerns bandwidth usage. SL is a bandwidth and resource hog. That's not a complaint, that's merely a condition that must be worked around. We have a T1 connection, which will support no more than 4 or 5 simultaneous client connections. If I were to try to bring 30 students on a virtual field trip, it would probably clog our internet connection to the point where nothing else would function until the area finished rezzing and then would clog again when changing areas. While I doubt that the Lindens have produced a caching proxy application for such a case, I'm wondering whether the cache of a single client could be shared among multiple clients and, if so, how?
I'm thinking that because my students are under 18, my project would have to be in Teen SL in order to comply with the TOS (which kind of presents a different problem since I'm over 18 and, therefore, banned from TSL). But if well-implemented it would probably be of interest to the public at large. Is it possible to mirror content between SL and TSL without doubling the maintenance fees?
Next issue is how to keep a group of students confined to a single area. While it's possible to keep avatars from moving into adjoining parcels through access lists, is there any way to disable teleporting on an avatar so that it must stay within a particular sim?
Those are the major issues that I see at this point. I'm probably overlooking something important, but it's a good start. Thanks for any help that you can provide.
The Wandering Fergus