Preserve inter-game backend please?

[shentino]

Hey noah I noticed you're gutting a lot of things.

Could you please preserve the ability for multiple instances of skotoslib to communicate on a shared backbone? For things like cross-game chatlines, centralized user accounts, and cross game assists?

I rather liked how Skotos was able to host multiple games with a shared backend and I'd like to preserve the ability to duplicate this functionality going forward.

[noahgibbs]

Sounds good. That's one I haven't intentionally tried to remove, but I also haven't tried to get working yet. Mostly I expect it just needs me to reverse-engineer and document the wire protocol and see if it needs an external server as a relay (I imagine it would.)

[shentino]

I can tell you straight up that the UserDB module is the one handling the "server" half of the interconnect process. The games connect to it via their UserAPI modules to the hub's UserDB module, which is why I got alarmed at the stuff you were removing.

[shentino]

In particular I think the ctl obj you removed seems problematic.

[noahgibbs]

In production, these days AuthD and CtlD are handled by thin-auth. It runs a CtlD server of its own (https://github.com/ChatTheatre/thin-auth/blob/master/server-control.php). The UserDB module might be used in some local configurations? But the local configurations are weird and quirky, and aren't used for the linode production config.

[noahgibbs]

One of my big goals is to get to the point where something other than MD5 is involved in any "real" (not dev-only) login. That's hard - even SHA1 hashes, the best that DGD supports, aren't terribly secure. The thin-auth method of using keycodeauth (nonces) can be adequate if we use https for everything, so that's my plan A.

But at this point, SkotOS games haven't been using the built-in CtlD in UserDB for awhile. We want that stuff (e.g. storypoints) to be shared across multiple games, so just having one built-in doesn't do what we want. Instead, UserAPI is used to query an external server for AuthD and CtlD info except in local modes (LOCAL_THEATRE, LOCAL_LOCAL.)

[shentino]

I was just hoping you would leave it working the way it originally did internally at skotos if possible. I know next to nothing about the thin auth client and I figured things would be kept simplest if the status quo was preserved.

I think there was a dumb daemon that played middle-man since at the time DGD didn't support outbound connections natively thus skotoslib in turn didn't exploit it.