[Opensim-dev] OSGrid <-> UCIGrid

[Cristina Videira Lopes]

On Oct 30, 2008, at 2:22 PM, Stefan Andersson wrote:

> I've been meaning to write a post for a very long time now. It's in  
> my draft folder. Just not getting it finished.
>
> First Step:
> Just wanted you all to consider what would happen if we, on  
> ExpectAvatar sent some aux info like 'home user server url', 'home  
> asset server url' and 'home inventory server url' to be attached to  
> the ScenePresence, and had all communications interactions use  
> those provided urls.
>

That's exactly what I was planning to do to get the avatar connected  
to its "home".
I had to add an additional step of informing the remote region of a  
"user", before ExpectAvatar and even before IncomingAgent, because  
when the server is informed of an incoming agent, it asks the local  
user service for that user, which is not there. So I was planning to  
enhance that incoming-user notification message with all the info  
about the user.


> What I'm saying is, that the region could accept any avatar in the  
> form of an authenticated and authorized UUID only, so - "grid"  
> would become meaningless and "intergrid" becomes a moot issue - all  
> regions would always expect all clients to come from all different  
> user/asset/inventory servers. The authorization aspect of the  
> "grid" would then be a question of service trust, regions clustered  
> under one governing entity implementing its own trust schemes. One  
> basic trust scheme would probably be https.

Yes, trust is definitely the major issue here.

But grids are a little bit more than just trust domains; they are  
optimizations of shared resources. For example, universities that set  
up their VWs will very likely want to centralize their user base,  
asset base, etc. It's just more convenient to manage. A single  
simulator is too fine-grain of a unit for medium-sized organizations.  
I can also see "communities" gathering around grids. So the grid  
concept is a convenient technical and social optimization. But yes,  
it's an optimization, it's not fundamental here.


> Next Step:
> Consider then, if you will, if the "home" configuration would  
> simply be a function of a login to your own "home" login server, or  
> simply as a function of a modified viewer, hence the viewer would  
> send preffered service url's on login.
>
> Hey Presto, 3D Web for real. It's not that far away, even given the  
> current architecture.


If you look at what I did for implementing the hypergrid, you'll see  
that it's ridiculously simple. Everything was already there! That's  
why I was able to do it so quickly. What took me longer was to get my  
head around the meaning of the map, something that fascinates me.  
Going peer-to-peer is fine, but what's the fun in pulling up the map  
and seeing only your little world? -- that would be terribly lonely.