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List Server

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Revision as of 21:11, 7 January 2010 by JeffM2501 (Talk | contribs) (mention BZAuthd as the wave of the future.)

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Overview

The BZFlag list server is a public service provided by the project administrators. By default all official game clients will connect to the list server to retrieve a list of publicly available game servers as well as to authenticate Global Registration data.

Technology

The list server is written in php and runs on top of an apache web server. It uses a pair of MYSQL databases to store data. The user portion of the database is shared with the PHPBB3 software that isused to run the BZFlag forums. The source code for the list server is licensed under the LGPL as part of the BZFlag Source Code under the 'db' project.

URL

Multiple URLs are provided for the list server. Some Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are known to cache web traffic on the default HTTP port (port 80). For users with such ISPs it may benefit them to use an alternate URL.

Valid URLs are;

Global Registration

The list server is the authentication point for the Global Registration system. The registration system lets users tie their user accounts from the BZFlag Forums to the playing account.

The list server is used to verify each users login credentials and provide a temporary token for the client to pass to the game server. The game server then verifies the token with the list server, and gets any authentication info it may need, such as user groups.

Hosting

Currently the list server runs on the same web server as the official BZFlag bulletin boards in the United States.

Outages

The project administrators attempt to keep list server outages to a minimum, but the current list server implementation does not handle heavy traffic loads as well as it could. Discussion and design work has been done on ways to improve the list server, anyone who would like to help with this project should read the Development Goals section on the list server, as well as discuss ideas with the development staff on IRC.

Public Usage Policy

The list server is subject to the BZFlag List Server Usage Policy. This policy states what the intended uses of the service are, as well as accepted behaviors of it's users are.

Future

A large project is underway to upgrade the underlying technology behind the list server and global authentication. The main goals are to make the system more robust and extensible. To this effort work is being done to move away from a PHPBB based user manager, and tward a system based on LDAP. The project has been ongoing for over two years and has over 10,000USD spent on it from Google Summer of Code Funds.

More info can be found on the BZAuthd page.

See also

Global Registration

List Server Usage Policy

BZFlag Forums

BZFS