[crossfire] new metaserver

[Brendan Lally]

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      mwedel at sonic.net
      
       06/02/05 08:23 AM >>>
     
     
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      1) Has someone agreed to run the metametaserver?  What about the slave 
     
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      metaservers?
     
     
I can host one, maybe two, but this assumes the use of HTTP.

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      4) Has anyone considered the approach where all the servers talk to the 
     
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      metametaserver (lets call it the master metaserver), and all the metaservers 
     
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      just regularly pull updates from the master metaserver?  
     
     
That is pretty much what I have been doing, except with all metaservers being 'passive' and without the metametaserver being protected.

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       Just some thoughts.  I'd probably still be good to rewrite the metaserver 
     
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     logic, but IMO, having the servers talk to web servers is an extra complication 
     
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     - pretty much all metaservers that are out there (certainly netrek at a minimum) 
     
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      use their own protocol for the servers to update the metaserver.
     
     
I know that freeciv uses HTTP POSTs to send data to its metaserver.

As it is HTTP is simpler, there are libraries (libcurl) that make it easier than dealing with sockets directly, and when there is a web server sitting in the middle then issues like threading, locking and blocking are dealt with automagically. Web servers often can behefit from things like caching also, and it may be possible to get compression for free too (I haven't looked into mod_gzip in detail yet).

It is also far easier to find places to host.