Virtual City Network(tm) Status Report, 11/21/93 Greetings, in some cases long overdue. If you are reading this directly (ie, not as a mailing list or netnews), your mail has been received and you have been either added to the virtual-citizens mailing list or preregistered for the Virtual City Network. I apologize for the delay in acknowledging correspondence from everyone. Here is a brief status report: Roughly a week after the initial announcement of Virtual City Network, I took a supposedly short term (one month) systems architect contract to generate income so that I could continue working on VCN. This allegedly 3/4-time position quickly turned into a 1 and 1/4 time position and will last until the first week of January. This has resulted in most of the substantive coding work on VCN being postponed in favor of design work which can be done offline, research and meetings with various interested parties, business contacts, fellow researchers, etc. For the last few months, virtual.net has been occupying a corner of a workroom at a friendly company and unofficially sharing a T1 net link. Unfortunately for us, this firm is expanding and needs the space for their own use. I have been exploring various options for office space and sharing network bandwidth to meet their deadline for moving the system. When the first of the recent sendmail bug announcements hit the Internet, we had a breakin and I had to spend a substantial amount of time going over the server to make sure nothing had been compromised. Thursday morning I logged in as usual to find that we had had *another* breakin on the server, this time much more serious than the first. Someone was allegedly using virtual-city.virtual.net as a link in a chain of telnet sessions, ultimately ending up on IRC and behaving offensively and objectionably. I am still investigating this incident. Having two (or possibly more) crackers on the system within a 3 week time period has been something of a last straw. Since I had a hard deadline of December 1st to move the system anyway, I took it offline on Friday evening (Nov 19th). At this point, the server is shut down and sitting in my livingroom. I will be bringing it up again in the next few days, and am arranging a 56K line to the house for access; right now we only have PPP 14.4Kbps service at home. I am setting up an MX server so that mail to virtual.net will continue to be delivered, that should be in place by Tuesday evening. Virtual-city.virtual.net is going to get a complete system upgrade and security overhaul before it comes back online. I will be installing a LISTSERV style mail handler for registration and automated handling of queries. I will send an announcement when the software is in place, probably sometime during the Thanksgiving weekend. I will not be turning on the virtual-citizens mailing list until the LISTSERV is set up, as I cannot respond to add and delete requests in a timely fashion while I am contracting on outside work. Mail to virtual.net will not be working until the MX record and my secondary server are both in place, so please send mail to me at either of the following addresses: strata@fenchurch.mit.edu strata@hybrid.com Please continue to send me questions and suggestions, I will respond to each and every one, albeit rather slowly. Thanks for being patient. Even though I won't be able to do much in the way of power coding until early January, I have been getting a lot accomplished. This thing has a lot of moving parts, so I'm doing comprehensive design rather than hacking stuff together. Once some of the low-level stuff is actually coded and not just on paper we should hit critical mass within a fairly short time and VCN will start living up to its potential. I am hoping to open the service to City Builders and Freelance Architects in mid to late January. New Year's Party in the Virtual City Plaza? Could still happen, but probably not with most of the interactive multimedia originally planned, we're running about a month or two behind. But you never know, I'm looking into some great Tcl/Tk stuff that may not be hard to get running in the short term, even with the massive constraints on my time right now. I will send out updates as I know more, and invite all of you to test features as they materialize. I hope to make documentation available soon on the design of VCMTA and the VCNCoreLib. Right now I am pretty deep into designing the underlying structure of VCMTA, so I will be outsourcing a fair chunk of the actual MOO hacking on the server structure. At this point I have design specs for various VCNCoreLib features (the built-in 'bot specs, Eliza handlers, etc) and am interested in contracting out the actual implementation-- I am still a novice at low-level MOO coding and want to make sure this stuff is very clean and very solid! I have some limited funding available for server hacking, especially the load and unload core functions, so if you are an experienced MOO coder who would like to do some moonlighting, please contact me. The pay isn't great, but you'll be getting paid to write public-domain MOO code that will be part of something Way Cool, and to potentially co-author a paper on extensible server design that will be submitted to a major VR conference next year. Think of it as being a grad student at a non-accredited virtual university. Not to mention your name in virtual lights on the Marquee in every CityKit that goes out. :-) Those of you who have pet projects or ideas about facilities that should be included in the Virtual City Network, please send me mail, especially if you're interested in building them yourself and making them available for others to use. People who are interested in designing spaces in the city should start to design them on paper/in bits now so that they can upload them easily once VCN opens. We will be supporting HTML documents as well as plain text for room descriptions, and will be setting up a Rogue's Gallery of players for browsing. The Rogue's Gallery will be accessible via Gopher and WWW as well-- you can work on the text of your character's description and create GIF files of the character, your planned virtual spaces, etc, right now and then have them readily available to upload later. Feel free to get started now! Design your virtual spaces and the objects that should be in them, get busy on that artwork, and watch for more mail from us. Closing the gap between Theorem Et Practicum, _Strata M. Strata Rose Unix & Network Consultant, SysAdmin & Internet Information Virtual City Network strata@virtual.net | strata@hybrid.com | strata@fenchurch.mit.edu [Virtual City Network is a trademark of VirtualNet and M. Strata Rose.]