[Opensim-users] Announcement of inventory tool (MyInventory), mostly of interest to grid operators/grid nauts

[Snowcrash Short]

Hi

I've been working on a client side tool for decentralizing user
inventories, which I will release as an open source tool in two weeks, some
of the features may be relevant to grid operators.

The basic premise of the tool is that the inventory and the backing assets
of the inventory items really should be controlled by the user. The tool is
born out of a frustration of having visited a number of grids. Each visit
to a new grid presents me with an empty inventory, and I can then spend
time searching for suitable item, clothing, attachments and
other accessories.

For this purpose I have created a tool which will allow me to backup my
inventory to a local cache and then upload the contents to another grid.

If my tool becomes popular, both the upload and download mechanisms may
have some impact on the grid-operators, hence this email to serve as a
notice.

The basic architecture is pretty simple, consisting of a number of import
agents, which can import the users inventory and backing assets to a local
database, and a number of upload agents which can upload inventory content
to a specific account.

Backup/Import
There are two import agents, one which will import .iar files and one which
works very much like I believe "Stored Inventory" works, which can backup
the inventory of an avatars inventory. Avatar backup/Import is governed by
a policy. Currently there are two policies, one complying with a very
restrictive interpretation of the Linden Labs policy on backups, and a
completely unrestricted policy, where anything that can be downloaded will
be downloaded.

When a new account is registered in MyInventory it checks if the account is
for a Linden Lab grid and limits the choices of policies to policies
suitable for LL's TOS, I cannot and do not know if other grids have similar
policies, I can well imagine that Avination has a similar restrictions, and
would like similar logic implemented to restrict the download. Any grid
operator which would like to have backup governed by a more restrictive
policy are invited to notify me and I will attempt to implement the policy
prior to the first release of the source code. or supply patches at a later
time.

Upload/Export
MyInventory supports two mechanisms for uploading inventory
content, traditional upload using UDP/CAPS and direct access to the
inventory and asset web-services.
Due to limitations in the UDP/CAPS protocol each upload will create new
assets, and as of my latest read of the Open Simulator code the asset store
does not support "single instance assets", i.e. it does not use a checksum
to verify if the asset already exists, for this reason MyInventory prefers
to upload using direct access to asset and inventory web-services.

I would propose that the grids which chooses to support MyInventory augment
their "GridInfoService" entries with the url's for the asset and inventory
web-services, e.g.

[GridInfoService]
    assets = http://assets.osgrid.org
    inventory = http://inventory.osgrid.org

Best regards
Snowcrash
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