[DGD] Re: Net Security

[Logic]

On Tue, 17 Mar 1998, Jason Cone wrote:
> could connect to the MUD.  However, to the extent of my knowledge, it's only
> possible to have 2 open prots without the addition of the net package - MUD
> port and an extra binary port.  I guess it's possible to have multiple
> protocols connect to the same port, but that's poor design in my opinion.

It's been done for a looooong time. Anyone here remember mudlink? ;-)

Really, having multiple protocols on one port isn't that difficult a task,
especially since you get to design the protocols. ;-) As long as the
authentication is the same in each (username/password, for example, just
like user logins), you can build custom "shells" to interact with, based
on the type of login (for normal users, you'd get a user object; for a
MUD-to-SMTP gateway, you'd get an object designed to talk that protocol;
etc).

You can even go farther, and do HTTP and Gopher this way; it's a damn easy
way to implement an HTTP server. ;-)

> Plus, the idea of having programs that are crucial to the functionality of
> the MUDlib *external* to the MUDlib doesn't make a lot of sense to me
> especially when it's possible to have them internal to the lib.

The argument for separation of some tasks is valid in the current LPC
uni-processing model, since you don't want work on one task to bog down
others (which can often result in the implementation of MOO-ish forced
splitting of tasks...blecch). However, when dealing with lightweight
network services (NNTP, HTTP, SMTP, etc), there's no realistic reason not
to provide language primitives for implementing it.

(Once there's a multi-threaded LPC implementation, however, the separation
of services argument really loses it's weight. There are still cases where
you might experience a win by separation, but they'd become very rare.)

-- 
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/  \   \ \/\  logic at logic.net                                                 \
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