[Opensim-dev] User services refactoring status

[Bryan Derksen]

On 04/01/2010 9:02 AM, diva at metaverseink.com wrote:
> Unless someone steps 
> in and takes care of the SQLite connector, I'm afraid it will go the way 
> of the dinosaurs.

I've had an SQLite-based personal standalone sandbox for some time now
as the full extent of my OpenSim administration and I figured with this
possibility impending I should see what it's like for a relative newbie
like me with no MySQL experience to set up a standalone using it. I'm on
Vista 64.

It wound up taking me about three hours to get fully up and running.
Installing MySQL itself was trivial but once I had it installed I was at
a bit of a loss on how to configure it. I didn't even really know what I
needed to do, let alone how to do it. The connection strings in the
default ini (from OSGrid's install) suggested I should set up have a
database named "opensim" and a user named "opensim" to go along with it
but there wasn't much else to go on.

I tried installing Workbench and fumbled around with that for a while
until I decided I was stuck down a dead-end. I did some more
web-searching, and finally found
http://opensimuser.wordpress.com/2008/07/16/opensim-mysql-install-guide/
- it's a year-old blog post and it didn't quite match up with what I
wound up needing to do but it pointed me in all the right directions and
I got the database set up.

Then I ran into a final hitch hunting through the various opensim ini
files to track down every place I needed to set up MySQL's connection
string. I missed StandaloneCommon.ini, causing my opensim to go through
an endless cycle of requesting baked avatar textures and not recognizing
that it had received them. Annoying but not too hard to catch on the
second go-through.

If you do wind up dropping SQLite, here's what would have made the
process go much easier for me:
* A "cookbook" setup guide like that blog post to be prominently linked
on the wiki (perhaps put a link right in the example ini itself). To
avoid reliance on the third party software used in this particular
example, perhaps a script to copy and paste into the MySQL command line
would be better.
* Would it be possible to bring the database-related configuration
options closer together in the ini file, to make it easier to set them
all up properly? Perhaps have one "default" connection string that will
be used if you leave the others blank, to avoid having to put the same
name and password scattered throughout?
* I haven't tried making a backup yet but that's going to be another new
learning experience. Some sort of cookbook/script for this would be
welcome too.

All in all, not as bad as I feared. But I'm only part noob so I can see
this being a stumbling point for many.