Hosting multiplayer server - config options

[Electronicbyte]

Good morning!
I'm looking at the viability of hosting a FlightGear Multiplayer Server for a youth group that I'm involved in.

However in order to do so I would need to disable the built in multiplayer chat and ensure the server was controlled access.

Are these two things possible with fgms?

Cheers

[Lincoln]

I have very limited knowledge but if i remember correctly as long you do not link your MP server to MPserver01 anyone connected to your MP server will not show up on the FGMP network. There are multiple servers out there that are not connected to MPServer01 and anyone on those servers does not show up on FGMP. I hope this answered your question a little bit. I have no idea however how this works but i do know that it is possible to host a server without appearing on FGMP itself.

[Electronicbyte]

Yes I got the impression that to set up a private server you just disable the relay server option within the FGMS config file.

However that's not exactly private, but rather, not advertised.

[PINTO]

Security through obscurity is your easiest path. If you want a full login scheme, the multiplayer servers dont have it yet. In addition you'd have to dive into the code to disable the chat.

I run the OPRF server, and we advertise a little bit but I still hardly get any traffic outside of events. If you just share your mpserver address at your youth group, I doubt you would have any issues at all. You are going to want to set up the telnet admin console so you can ip ban people easily, but in the several years running the OPRF server I haven't had to do that.

[drR0ckso]

If you're standing up a small server and you're not hosting to the world, you can block IP ranges known to be from certain parts of the world, or canvass your users and determine IP ranges that are best and configure the server. On the public servers, there isn't that luxury, because it's possible someone from around the globe may decide to connect to a given server. From the configuration side, MPSERVER01 knows that it is going to connect to (example) MPSERVER99, and MPSERVER99 knows it is going to connect to MPSERVER01. MPSERVER01 attempts to unilaterally connect to MPSERVER99 once the configuration is setup in the hub, and MPSERVER99 will try to connect to MPSERVER01 on start automatically.

There is a DNS record that needs to be added for the server to work with the automatic server selection logic. For example,

Name: mpserver51.flightgear.org
Address: 45.58.56.11
mpserver51.flightgear.org text = "flightgear-mpserver=eyJuYW1lIjoibXBzZXJ2ZXI1MSIsImxvY2F0aW9uIjoiQXRsYW50YSwgR0EsIFVTQSJ9Cg=="

In order to participate in the FGTracker, you must enable tracking and configure the server accordingly, but most importantly, you have to request the server be tracked. Otherwise, there will be errors in the log regarding the tracking server, which will simply ignore your attempts to communicate.

If you're passing around a server name to use for your event, this doesn't matter. If you want to link in a virtual event server to the MPSERVER network, it's only necessary configure that server as part of the network. Note that each server has individual tracking through FGTracker, regardless if it is operating as a hub server or not. A hub can talk to a hub, but the network isn't tolerant of routing loops, thus there should never be a loop, intentionally or accidentally.

http://wiki.flightgear.org/Howto:Set_up ... yer_server
- yes, it's that easy.
http://wiki.flightgear.org/Multiplayer_protocol

http://wiki.flightgear.org/Howto:Multiplayer

About 80 kbit/s per user, which is why those multiplayer events can be destructive because 10 sessions is 800 kbit/s plus the other traffic crossing the network at any given time. For some home internet connections, that isn't anything, but for some, it is.