Opening the grid...? How feasible is it and how would it work...

Inspired by the concept of running your own sims on your own servers that connect back to the main grid - I expect this has been discussed around the table at LL many times but I wonder how we, the community would envisage this working.

To me it makes perfect sense to "fragment" the grid. Have many servers all over the world running their own sims that av's from the main grid can connect to and tp into from the main grid. This sim distribution would in essence work rather like the internet does today.

But what of issues of trust? The availability of the asset server?

How fundamentaly could this work?

There are places like OpenLife, etc but I haven't really had capability or patience to check them out.
I thought about doing it off line to test textures, clothes and when I just wanted to build and create things without being online but I just haven't had time to check it out.
I hear it crashes a lot for those of us with older machines.
There is suppose to be a way to do it off line, your inventory is on your own hard drive and there is ways to do private servers but you would need to know how to do a whole lot of things if you wanted it on server, or offline like how to keep it secure yourself, make everything yourself or hire, pay or have someone else who can.
Openlife I think they have online version on their own computer, there is subscription service but not sure what the 75 usd a month pertains too.

They don't even need to be called 'Servers" just regular computers. Extra hard drive might be needed if you want lots of sims.

In fact running them on your own personal computers opens up a whole new raft of possibilites - I'm thinking something like peer-to-peer sims - which further fragments the grid and makes it truly portable. In reality I suspect you need a server for it to be of any use and to guarantee persistance. Always on, always connected - updates and service patches could work in a way that is transparent then much like (arguably) windows patches.

You can rent pretty decent dedicated boxes in colo's these days for between 50 and 100 bucks a month with a modern quad and a few gigs you could easily run a small region with equivalent performce to the main grid

The problem would be quickly apparent in performance at first.
1 - Bandwith : the amount of data sent back and forth would be extreme compared to normal use (you need both high upload as well as high download speed. Meaning business class lines to run them efficiently, and even then depending on the traffic dedicated T1s or better)
2 - System : The dedicated servers running sims can suffer performance issues right now, most of the home systems are no where as powerful. And most home systems are going to be multi-use boxes with lots of additional services and processes eating up system resources. Then there is the data storage issues, since you would need to be able to cache a lot of data on the machine to handle content on the sim. (edit: though they will run as application servers and not data servers, they still need a hefty hard drive amount for data cache for people's items and well as sim based items. )

Then there are the assets, which run into various laws and concerns. As it stands you don't 'buy' an item in second life, you purchase the right to use that IP on the servers (Linden Labs owns all in world assets, you are paying the owner of the IP for the right to use the idea in world according to readings of the TOS and other legal sources). To protect the IP rights of the creators, the best step for a distributed grid would be portals that strip off items from one grid and add your assets on the next grid. In effect you would have inventory items usable only on specific server networks, direct asset server access would require very careful security checks and balances... but even then it would still be susceptible to man in the middle attacks and nothing is full proof.

Those are the two major issues, there are also plenty of others out there.

People with old or weak computers may have to upgrade, but upgrading has to happen anyway.

The openlifegrid.com standalone sim(s) is free. On that page choose "Run an island on your own PC" just to see what running islands on your local machine is like.

I agree bandwidth is the problem, hence it would only work if you have servers - the p2p model is fundamentally flawed, and of course you would need a fairly decent server to participate.

Black-boxing the asset server *should* resolve masny of the security/TOS issues as LL still retin control over assets and economy - server owners would have to subscribe to an api to gain access to assets that their characters posess and thus the IP bit is negated because the assets are still within the domain of LL.

In the current architecture Man-in-the-middle attacks are just as feasible as with the proposed "concept" I don't know but I would assume there is already some sort of public/private key encryption in place protecting the asset server.

I suppose putting the technology bit aside - the real question is why would you want to do this? A few ideas might be:

-SMB's who want to have virtual offices independent of the main grid
-Architecture companies who want to create "models" for clients and pitches
-Geeks who just want to do it "because they can"

I'm sure there are many more...

The upgrade would be buying something like a $4000 investment to meet minimum system requirements (not matching the servers used by linden labs) that would be dedicated to just running your personal sim. A box that could do more would probably be in the $6000+ range

Then you would need a dedicated internet connection for it that has a high upload and download speed. (compared to standard residential broadband which has high downloads but substantially lower upload speeds)

Aren't there some security considerations with a grid-connected sim running on a *home* network? I suppose, if I were really terminally bored someday, maybe I could envision running a separate segment off the DMZ with a completely disposable and otherwise fully locked-down sim host. Otherwise this really seems like commercial hosting territory (which is really a bargain anyway, for doing anything more than goofing around).

And bandwidth is certainly a big problem: although I have a pretty fat fiber pipe coming in the wall, I certainly don't have a server hosting agreement with my ISP, so if I started actually filling my upstream bandwidth... I think the euphemism is "traffic shaping."

And all this assumes the grid interconnect fees will be comparable to the cost of leasing a sim from LL--some even envision lower costs, but much, much higher is also a possibility, at least at first, because anything less than a mini-continent's worth of interconnect presents LL with more support hassle than revenue opportunity.

Or, of course, one can just play around with a standalone sim. But the fun of that for me would have a half-life best expressed in seconds.

IBM iirc does have their own internal grid that they are testing for collaboration use in the company that is separate from the regular grid.

Open sim is pretty much the geek example. The sims are not under the strain that the main grid sims are by a long shot.

The architecture use is tricky till the system has a way to import and build displays from CAD designs in as prim efficient a manner as possible before I could see it as viable.


back to the tech

Man in the middle with the current setup isn't quite as risky, copy bot is a good example. But it didn't utilize a direct link to the asset server resulting in the possibility of a direct copy of every asset someone owns by stepping onto a private sim.

Black boxing only works so well, encryption helps a lot but there are a few more possible attacks. The only way would be similar to bonded carriers in the physical world being used to run the servers.

You would need to have a decent firewall on the pipe, and open ports as needed for the services (meaning lots of tech knowledge recommended). A DMZ would be an option, but the box will need to be web hardened.

Considering a basic T1 is easily a $100+ a month, the price of running the server (computer just will not cut it for a grid accessible sim) and maintaining it, then add the fees from linden labs to connect (and utilize the appropriate security APIs)... prices add up quick

For it to work on home systems we would have to cache most textures somehow, and probably some common prims like wall & floor sections, to get any decent speed. SL just repeatily downloads too much of the same stuff we did yesterday.
A better option would be to rent server space with your ISP instead so others still had access 24/7 at a decent speed and number of users, yet you could be competitative on price and still design / backup your sim on your home machine offline if you wished, but there would be little benefit. Maybe we could cache textures at our ISP's somehow.
You think lag is bad now wait till you try accessing an island sim in cuba hosted on a budjet supersaver $20 per month server plan.

Ummm hard to say
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Running_at_Home_and_Offline

The networking topography is feasible, it's the software and hardware sides that raise problems.

Ya, what's with that anyway? I'd love the cache system to be segmented to different regions. So that the sims i visit most often would get priiority in the cache stack up like mayby 7 sims then space for a variable eighth sim

Well I think it's the fact the sims are changing constantly, few are static.

Then you add in avatar information

And it can fill up quicker than you think

And if they don't have it purging people would complain over it eating up HD space

well it sort of defeats the whole purpose of having a cache in the first place doesn't it?

"Well I think it's the fact the sims are changing constantly, few are static."

Constantly? Not THAT much.

"Then you add in avatar information"

and this is relevant how? caching an current avatars is miniscule compared to whole sims.

"And it can fill up quicker than you think"

Who said anything about never purging?

And they do change, it does seem to pre-cache a bit outside of your viewing range and purges anything that exceeds the pre-cache distance to cut down on bandwith.

To cache a whole sim would take a while, try setting view to max and go to bare rose for a good example.

It may not seem like things change, but you have: scripts, multi-item vendors, slide shows, and all sorts of other 'static' items that have to be cached

And avatars can be anything but minor for the cache (attachments, animations, gestures, etc...)

Not how I would do it, but oh well.

Anything that's currently being simulated (rezzed prims and attachments) doesn't exist on the asset server, it exists on the sim.

The sim can change permissions on it, act as a perfect copybot, rollback at will, etc. There is nothing you can do to keep it from happening when they "own" (in the actual owning or renting the hardware sense) it.

Encryption solves the problem of noone but the intended destination being able to see the contents, it doesn't solve the problem where the destination is inherently untrusted.

You can encrypt things however you like, the sim needs to be able to decrypt it by necessity which means the person running the sim can decrypt it as well. There is no way to decouple that.

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We will eventually get an "open" grid, but the only companies trusted enough to have full access will be the likes of IBM where you can be sure that breach of contract is highly unlikely and results in multi-million penalty fees.

For everyone else the only difference will be that you can tp over to their "opensim" without needing to log in and out, but you won't have anything travelling with you.

"you can tp over to their "opensim" without needing to log in and out, but you won't have anything travelling with you."

apparently some Lindens did exactly that just today.

http://zhaewry.wordpress.com/

We can't have puppeteering because "no new features, have to work on stability", but they can waste time on that .

As ruth, they are not transferring assets yet from the test grid to the opensim they finally got the transfer of a avatar to the sims

http://zhaewry.wordpress.com/2008/06/05/happy-jumpy-ruths-interop-takes-a-step/

I think they would be called servers if that's what they were doing.

I occasionally use the home server to do exactly what someone suggested, test textures and such inworld without having to pay any fee's or worry about been lagged or any of the other myrid little reasons SL bugs people ... grins

the standalone version of the server doesn't use that much CPU power at all, I run it networked to my main computer from an old 733, and watching it from task manager, it barely uses a few percent, more when starting up/shutting down, but not a whole lot more, and certainly less than your e-mail web browser prolly even use. saying that, the client IS the SL client, so requirements for that stay the same, with the only real difference you note there been absoutly zero lag and uploading takes as long as it takes the server to make the required entry in your inventory.

as far as I have been able to figure out, you can add more than 1 island to it, though I have personally yet to figure out how, but then I haven't dug much as I've never needed more than 1 island, not somewhere to really explore.

can get the standalone version from the openlife websites