It has been a while since I made a D2 + Wifi releases. I had been waiting for OpenSim 0.7.1; the changes between 0.7.0.2 and 0.7.1 were such that I didn’t want to risk making a release in between. OpenSim 0.7.1 finally happened earlier this week, so here is the much awaited D2! Technically, it corresponds to OpenSim r15402, which is a couple of commits after the official release — I found a couple of bugs in the official release related to the Library, so I fixed them.

Things to pay attention to when you update your D2:

• This time after you Update, you need to run Configure again on your new installation, because of changes in configuration variables. In order for this process to be as smooth as possible, have your current config-include/MyWorld.ini open in one window while answering the questions for Configure in the new install. If you had made changes to your MyWorld.ini, simply add those changes to the new MyWorld.ini that is produced after running Configure.
• As usual, the Update tool will ask you if you want to preserve any changes you may have made to your Wifi pages. I always say “yes, I want to preserve my own.” By doing that, it’s guaranteed that the new Wifi installation will use the pages that I had before. However, this time there is a nice improvement in the splash.html page that shows some statistics at the bottom — see here for example. Not a problem. When Update copies over your old pages into the new install, it also places the new ones under WifiPages with extension .diva, for example, splash.html.diva. That way you can easily see the differences between the two and copy-and-paste the parts that matter. In my case, this time, I simply replaced the entire splash.html file with the new one; you may want to check your own changes.
• Marck added support for localization in Wifi (he’s German). Now you can have your Wifi installation in your favorite language. See here for how to do that (scroll down for the LOCALIZATION section).
• The Wifi administrator account has a teaser new link called “Console”, a new feature that we have been working on. It’s undocumented for the time being, because it’s not secure enough for me to recommend using it. It will come to life in a future release.
• Bad news: Teleports between OpenSim 0.7.0.x installations and OpenSim 0.7.1 installations are incompatible, because of a bug fix in libomv. You probably knew that if you had tried to HG TP to OSGrid.
• Good news: most large grids, like OSGrid, are already running 0.7.1, so you can finally join the crowd there.
• To test HG TPs, feel free to use my own world, http://ucigrid01.nacs.uci.edu:9001. It’s somewhere in the 5000’s and reachable from all D2’s if you haven’t changed your coordinates.

Have fun!

UPDATE (5/7): I realize that many people may not have noticed the subtle differences in HG addressing that happened between 0.6.9 (HG 1.0) and 0.7.0.x (HG 1.5), and then between 0.7.0.x and 0.7.1. Let me explain.

An HG address in the old HG 1.0 was simply the address of a particular simulator. HG 1.0 did not have the concept of “grid” in place, so even if a simulator was part of a grid, its HG address was the simulator’s address. For example, in the UCI grid you could reach individual simulators with addresses like ucigrid04.nacs.uci.edu:9007 (the Gateway 7000 region); note that ucigrid04 is the machine where that particular simulator runs, and 9007 is the HTTP port of that particular simulator.

With HG 1.5, the concept of “grid” has been put in place. A “grid” is a collection of simulators running under the same authority and that  share one single “Gatekeeper.” The Gatekeeper is central to HG 1.5 security and, in grids, it usually runs in the Robust server. The Gatekeeper is the entry point to every single incoming request like link region requests and agent transfer requests. In HG1.5 you cannot link directly to simulators anymore; you link to Gatekeepers wherever they live. For example the Gateway 7000 region in the UCI Grid is now accessed like this: http://ucigrid00.nacs.uci.edu:8002 “Gateway 7000″.  A few of things to notice:

• First, the “domain:port” syntax that was used before (and that is still accepted for the time being, but considered obsolete) has been replaced by a full-blown URL starting with “http://”. This is so that HG services can be implemented by regular web applications. For example, the Gatekeeper of ScienceSim lives in http://grid.sciencesim.com/grid/hypergrid.php — yes, a php script.
• Second, the URL is that of the Gatekeeper, not of the region itself. The region is referred to by name after the URL, and when the name has white spaces you need to use quotes. If you want to reach UCI Grid’s Gateway 7000 region, you can pull up the map in the viewer and type exactly what I just wrote in bold up there. Or if you want to use the link-region command on the sim console  you can type:
  $ link-region <local_x> <local_y> http://ucigrid00.nacs.uci.edu:8002 “Gateway 7000″
• Individual Gatekeepers may have different policies in place concerning incoming links, so a link request to specific regions inside a grid may very well fail; or it may be required. If you simply specify the URL of the Gatekeeper and omit the region name, the Gatekeeper is supposed to link you to a default region in that grid, if it is defined. If that’s not defined in the target grid, then the link request will fail.

For standalones like D2, there is no difference between “grid” and “simulator” — they’re one and the same. In standalones, the Gatekeeper runs inside the simulator. As a consequence, the HG address is that of the simulator itself. But  the points made above still apply, conceptually speaking.

UPDATE (5/8): well, foo! I found one wrong configuration variable in diva-r15402. I made a new release diva-r15402-b that corrects it. If you updated to diva-r15402, please update again, so that you get diva-r15402-b. No need to run Configure on this small update. Just run Update, switch to the new installation, run OpenSim from there and you’re done. (If you update from an older release, then you need to run Configure, as the instructions say).

Also, I found that it’s better to remove the old hyperlinks from the DB so that old formats don’t get in the way of your travels. It’s very simple. Login to your DB and issue this statement: DELETE FROM regions WHERE flags=524  (524 are hyperlinks)

It took a long time, but OpenSim 0.7 is finally here! It’s quite difficult to explain the value of refactorings and of  re-conceptualizations of the software, which is what happened to OpenSimulator between 0.6.x and 0.7. Those things tend to be intangible at first (“WTF? This does the same thing! And it has bugs that it didn’t have before!”, etc.); the ROI only shows up later.

As an example of the new interesting things that can now be done, this new release features an embedded Web application for handling user registrations. It’s called Wifi. The features of Wifi are quite simple:

• Account creation, optionally controlled by the administrator
• Configurable default avatars for new accounts
• Account updates by both users and administrator
• Account deletion by administrator
• Password recovery via email
• Simple user inventory management

These features are enough for the worlds I run; they’ll be enough for many people, I think. This is just the first release, I expect Wifi to improve as we go a long — especially if more people want to help… I welcome help on this!

See it in action in one of my test worlds. Feel free to create a dummy account, login to it, recover your password, etc. And login to the world afterward. You can also use it for testing your own installation of the diva distro by hypergriding to it. (Note: this world is just for demonstration of Wifi and of the latest diva distro release; it will be shut down in a couple of weeks)

Wifi has a few interesting properties that make it a good fit for small-to-medium OpenSimulator-based virtual worlds. First of all, it doesn’t require the installation of Apache or other Web servers; it’s all done within the OpenSimulator code base. If you’re like me, you will think of this as a major win. Not having to install an additional major component like Apache and PHP/Python/what-have-you means less administrative hassle, less load on the machine, and just plain joy. Web app! No Apache! Just OpenSimulator! Yey!

Second, using the OpenSimulator code base brings many technical benefits. This isn’t an immediate benefit, but it is a benefit in the long run. Unlike the Apache-based Web apps that interface with the DB directly, Wifi interfaces with the OpenSimulator services layer using the core code, and therefore it is isolated from future changes to the OpenSimulator DB schema. In short, and of interest to diva distro users, Wifi will probably never be in the situation that other apps of the same kind are, always on the verge of being discontinued due to the hassle of making it catch up with the OpenSim schema. In the long run, this is a very good thing.

Third, technically, Wifi is a set of components that can be loaded up by both standalone simulators and Robust servers. What this means is that the exact same thing can serve diva distro worlds as well as larger grids in one seamless environment, OpenSimulator. I haven’t packaged it up for grids, but I might consider doing it at some point. So if your world grows to a medium grid, Wifi can handle it with no hassle.

Enjoy!

And, of course, also enjoy the extra security in HG 1.5, but that is invisible.

Here are the relevant links:

• Latest diva distro
• How to set it up in 5 steps (6 for *ix)

If you already have a diva distro up & running, simply run Update.exe on it and follow the instructions. This time, it’s really important that you read the release notes.

One last important note: the sequence of upgrades has a ‘pivot’ release at r12751. In other words, r12751 is a mandatory stop from all older releases. From r12751 on, upgrade gets you the latest. This new release today is r13458.