Or, more accurately, we now have grid mode in Houston.
In the last episode of this tale, OpenSim was running on the Vista machine in standalone mode using MySQL as the database. The hoped for goal this weekend was to have it running in grid mode. That is just not going to happen.
Knowing Vista’s penchant for looking like it is secure, I knew that I had better be sure to have exceptions in the firewall for the ports used by the various servers. The port usage is:
grid server – port 8001
user server – port 8002
asset server – port 8003
inventory server – port 804
Now you open a port in Vista’s firewall separately for TCP and UDP. It was not immediately clear without perusing the code which transport mechanism each server needed, so I just created an opening for both in each port. Should be ready to go, right? No.
Each of the user, grid, asset, inventory, and messaging servers seemed to start correctly. Each was started on a command prompt which was opened as Administrator. When OpenSim was then started, a dialog from Vista came up saying that opensim.exe was being blocked, and did I want to unblock it. Of course I said yes, but opensim.exe continued to be blocked. Error messages showed up on the command prompt indicating that opensim.exe couldn’t access port 8001 or 8002. So, what more was I supposed to do?
It occurred to me that the problem might be coming from the McAfee Security Center. That piece of junk was forced on me when I loaded all the software necessary to connect to my employer’s network with VPN. I work for the local power company, or as I affectionately refer to it, “Programmer Hell”, and we sometimes need to work from remote locations. hence the VPN. In the process of loading from the net, the code checks to see if your computer has acceptable virus protection, acceptable meaning do you have McAfee. If you don’t, that garbage gets installed. It seems to have its own firewall, and that has to be turned off as well.
Now to be sure, one of my main goals in life is to find a way to escape from Programmer Hell, and that is going to get done in the fullness of time. Then I can rip all that crap off the Vista laptop and be shed of it. For now, however, I’m stuck with it so I’ll have to find a workaround.
Okay, Vista’s firewall and the McAfee firewall are disabled, and it is still no go. I did a restart as you sometimes need to do with Windows to let it know you really do want the changes, and that didn’t help. There was only one thing to do, and that was wipe all the OpenSim off the Vista machine, along with the Subversion server. The short answer is, that under no circumstances can OpenSim and Vista work compatibly.
So, back to the original build which was done on the machine on the network running the small business version of Windows Server 2003. Based on what I learned about the correct way to set up OpenSim.ini, I modified the Windows 2003 server version of it appropriately. Then, I made sure that there was a database named opensim on the MySQL instance, and that I had gotten all the tables created previously out if it. (Remember, you don’t have to call it opensim but I did so to stay compatible with the documentation on the OpenSim website.)
Now, to get this build running in standalone mode first. OpenSim.exe was started, and the SL viewer was started on another computer on the network. I logged in as Test User, and happily the default avatar, who I have now permanently dubbed Jeannie because she looks like an old girlfriend of that name, suddenly appeared. Standalone mode was working.
Now, the big moment. Will it run in grid mode. Each of the servers were started in the proper order, then opensim.exe was started. Remember, by the way, that when OpenSim is running in grid mode, the loginuri command switch you start the SL viewer with is different. The command line looks like this:
>cd C:\Program Files\SecondLife
>SecondLife -loginuri http://192.168.2.1:8002
Of course, 192.168.2.1 happens to be the IP of the Windows Server 2003 on my network. Put in what yours is, of course. The important thing is that you use port 8002 instead of the port 9000 used when OpenSim is in standalone mode. To make a long story short, everything works fine. Jeannie is there, with her same old red pants and purple shirt. She’s standing on that lonely little desert island in the middle of that infinite sea. But by Damn she’s doing it in grid mode!
So, now what. For the rest of the weekend, nothing. There are other things nagging at my time. But as the days and weeks go on, there is fixing the physics so everything can be solit, getting other avatar shapes so all the avatars don’t look alike, etc.
Now that this contraption will actually work in grid mode, I have to see just how the Chicken Fried Hell you can get a second region running. Then, I can have two desert islands instead of one. And, on it goes. You’ll be hearing a lot about that, and I would like to hear your comments as well.
Tags: OpenSim, OpenSimulator
