[Opensim-users] Hypergrid & USB stick

[Sarge Misfit]

Don't know if this ahs been answered, I'm not quite awake yet *sips
coffee*, but Ener wrote a two part article about HG & SoaS. Here's the
links ....
Part 1: http://iliveisl.com/hypergrid-from-sim-on-a-stick-if-you-are-german/
Part 2: http://iliveisl.com/hypergrid-from-sim-on-a-stick-part-2/

Hope that helps

Sarge Misfit

On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 5:24 AM, Sean McNamara <smcnam at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 7:32 AM, Owen Kelly <owen.kelly at arcada.fi> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I am having trouble thinking through a problem I seem to be having with
> an educational project for children we are making using OpenSim. The
> children all have individual single-user pocket worlds which they keep on
> usb sticks. (The installation uses Ener Hax's sim-on-a-stick.) We want them
> each to be able to teleport to a shared social world on our university
> server, much like Topology B on this page:
> http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Hypergrid
> >
> > The social world has a static IP address. The usb sticks have no IP
> address that is knowable in advance.
> >
> > This project is intended to work with 2 school classes, and the staff
> and pupils of those classes should be the only people in the social world.
> The usb sticks should definitely not be on the public map. Neither should
> the social world be available except from the usb sticks, which should only
> be able to transport their users from the pocket world to the social world
> and back again.
>
> If you already understand how to set this up to listen on the public
> Internet, then you don't have very much left to do.... you just need
> to set up a firewall *somewhere* (whether on the individual lab PCs or
> on the hardware router/firewall that connects them together).
> Actually, if you just put all the PCs on a common NAT, you don't have
> to explicitly block any ports -- the ports will be blocked per default
> because the router won't forward inbound packets anywhere unless you
> explicitly set up port forwarding rules.
>
> If you literally have every student's machine hooked up to the public
> internet with a unique public IP address, you can still set them up on
> a software NAT using a reasonably beefy (and/or not very busy) regular
> PC. You didn't state what operating system you have or any of the
> technical details, so I can't provide any more specific help than
> that.
>
> Basically don't worry about restricting opensim from accessing the
> public internet. Instead, restrict the network layer with a firewall.
>
> It will be significantly harder to prevent your students from
> hypergridding to *other* grids from their client software. Hypergrids
> can listen on an arbitrary port, even 80 (which is normally unblocked
> for HTTP). Unless you have a very clever transparent proxy or forced
> http proxy, you won't be able to (easily) distinguish between
> students' legitimate outbound network traffic -- such as accessing the
> university's library site in a browser -- and hypergridding to another
> opensim community, such as osgrid or 3rd rock.
>
> You *could* entirely disable public internet access during your
> lesson, if you have full control over all of the student machines and
> they don't need the internet for the exercise. This would be the only
> way to definitively prevent them from going "outbound" to connect to
> an arbitrary server. Just block all outbound ports on all outbound IPs
> except for the CIDR of the LAN/NAT (probably 10.x.x.x or 192.x.x.x).
>
> >
> > I have read all the documentation and tutorials that I can find about
> hypergridding, but I am still not sure of the best way to approach this. I
> have an uneasy suspicion that this may be very simple and I am foolishly
> over-thinking it.
> >
> > Could anyone offer any guidance please? I would be happy for anything
> from a suggested starting point to a step-by-step guide.
>
> If you think it's going to be a problem to know the IP addresses of
> the individual grids in advance, you'll need to use hostnames. Make
> sure all the computers can ping each other by hostname, and make sure
> the students can't change the hostnames. Problem (should be) solved.
> You can now configure your grid based on the hostnames of the other HG
> "pocket worlds".
>
> Lastly -- if this configuration is expected to be established over the
> public internet with each of the students residing in their own house
> or dormitory, using their own computer, I think the only way to make
> it remotely possible would be to use a VPN such as Hamachi to get
> everyone on the same LAN. But since you have no control over students'
> computers or networks, all bets are off as far as getting them to
> concentrate on the lesson vs. surfing the web. It's only really
> possible to control a setup like this if you have all the computers
> (owned by the school) set up in a room, all connected to the same
> router. THAT should work as I described above.
>
> -Sean
>
> >
> > Many thanks
> > Owen
> > _______________________________________________
> > Opensim-users mailing list
> > Opensim-users at lists.berlios.de
> > https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/opensim-users
> _______________________________________________
> Opensim-users mailing list
> Opensim-users at lists.berlios.de
> https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/opensim-users
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://opensimulator.org/pipermail/opensim-users/attachments/20120309/ce74afa7/attachment.html>