[Opensim-dev] Distributed grid services / LDAP login status

[Hurliman, John]

A status update on where the distributed grid services project is at:

* The distributed asset server project (http://forge.opensimulator.org/gf/project/assetserver/) has turned into the distributed grid services project. The asset server is almost at the same functionality as OpenSim.Grid.AssetServer.exe (it cannot create the MySQL database from scratch, but everything else seems to be in order), inventory functionality has been merged into the asset server, and a user server project has been started to provide distributed authentication for the other services.

* OpenID endpoint support is functioning in the asset server. You can currently log directly in to the asset server with an OpenID. Work has begun on an end-to-end protocol for authorized access to the asset server using the user server as an OpenID provider. The process works slightly differently from most web OpenID logins in the case where you have already logged in to a user server, since you are only reconfirming your identity with a session cookie (automatically) at that point.

* Inventory support only has a file-system backend currently, a MySQL database backend that is compatible with the existing OpenSim.Grid.InventoryServer.exe backend is on the short term roadmap.

* Login with the new user server is functional. There are still a lot of XML-RPC calls to implement, which will happen right after the distributed authentication is tested.

* LDAP login is working. Since the LL viewer cannot easily support direct LDAP logins (it MD5 hashes the password before sending it), a simple web interface was added at /ldap that, upon login, will create a new avatar with your LDAP first name, last name, and hash of your current password. This could be merged into a larger account creation interface.

* The asset server is powering an internal grid at Intel and appears to be performing well. The next step is to roll out to external grids for more thorough testing soon.

The asset server is the most documented service at this point. A general overview of the vision is available at: http://www.opensimulator.org/wiki/AssetServerProposal

Wire protocol documentation: http://www.opensimulator.org/wiki/AssetServerProposal/ClientDocs
Documentation of the asset server codebase: http://www.opensimulator.org/wiki/AssetServerProposal/DeveloperDocs

Additionally, a simple implementation of the asset server has been written in ~200 lines of Python as a Google AppEngine script for testing. A live instance of this trimmed down version is running at http://assetserver.appspot.com/ (code is in SVN at trunk/AppEngine). If you use this for testing, please play nicely until authentication is added.

John