Linking linkshell chat to our website

[psnsonixx]

Thanks to Miisha for inspiring me to finally doing this.. this is one days work so don't kill me yet.. I have yet to add the part where you can reply.. its not hard I just ran out of time .

I did my best to mimic in game, its all text/css.. ajax will be there when im done.. it is now but its not working 100%.. I will be providing this to everyone to use for free, as a hosted solution when im done.

http://www.ffxi-poisoned.com/lschat/

This is a "live" copy of the code, however the datasource that it pulls from is not updated for obvious reasons that I don't want my ls chat shared with the public.. but it's functional.

Oh.. 1 more thing if you notice the <jigga> Drake: yo.... I was just showing people what it "would" look like, it was just typed it. Hope you like it.

[Yorlan]

Re: to whoever said FFXI-App has been doing this for a while. Perhaps I'm the only one one who feels this way but I'm not too keen on uploading someone else's PHP script onto my personal web server. Of course, I'm a PHP programmer and would never upload anything without reading its contents, but I'm sure not everyone knows a thing about PHP.

The easiest method and possibly the safest from being exploited is using PuTTy to map a port on the PC to the server's database port (say 3306 for MySQL). Configure SSH to use another port besides the default 22 and to require a key (no passwords) for login. For extra security, map iptables to accept foreign connections to the database port only from a certain IP address (the client).

Theoretically, it should be rather easy to implement using WH to read the chat log/input new commands and querying the server via SQL. If you build the table with timestamps, you can easily do a "timestamp > $last_used_timestamp" query. It should be considerably faster than performing a POST, GET, etc., request to the web server since you're not waiting for Apache/IIS to process the request, have PHP/Tomcat/ASP.NET do all the querying, then send it to the client.

Just some thoughts for anyone wishing to implement something like this for their LS.

[psnsonixx]

Except that most people don't own their own servers, and most hosts (like myself) do NOT allow remote sql. It's untrackable bandwidth and opens up yet another port to the outside.. ok, you can ssh tunnel it, but I for one don't allow customers SSH access either. Alot of cheaper hosts do, this is true. But tunneling it over ssh and doing direct sql may not be the route here, really.. and definately not the most practical for most, although it would work for experienced users (i am one and I still don't think its practical enough). I did what you are describing with pop3 once because my mail server didn't have ssl / tls support.. it worked, but was ghetto.. also did it to tunnel MSSQL for a billing system.. Doing the post thing isn't really all that inefficient, esp if the parsing is done by the client not by the server. I'll have something more solid for everybody to use sooner then later.. with complete security designed, linkshell owners can setup passwords, sub members (ie password required to view chat).. im building a little community site for it.

[Raineer]

Except that most people don't own their own servers,

There's a decent chance there is one techie in each LS who can approach the skills necessary to set this up.

You don't need a "server" for the kind of bandwidth this will require. I have a $150 Athlon64 box which I originally built just to run FreeNAS, which now houses my website, ftp, ssh, email servers all in one. I know any Linux geek can do all the above (it's quite easy), but I think you're making the barrier of entry sound a bit higher than it actually is.

All this runs fine with standard Comcast as well, granted the FTP caps at like 100k upload (so I rarely use it externally), but for the LS Chat application I believe it would be plenty fine.

[psnsonixx]

I wasn't really talking about running it out of a house.. too unreliable/dynamic ips.. I don't like the dynip services, and I am sure not paying $10/month for a static ip.. it's an insult when I have like a /22 at my datacenter.. if I had to pay $10/ip there.. phew heh.. I was really talking more of the "professional" side of running it.. but you're right, i'm a perfectionist and go overboard all the times, you could easily set it up at home and rig it to 'be good enough'.. that just isn't acceptable for me.. my flaw

[Raineer]

Nah I understand what you mean. For what it's worth, my IP with Comcast hasn't changed in the three years I have been at this address. I know there is some luck involved with that but it's been great so far. Supposedly it may not change unless I change my cable modem.

I don't have to use dyndns(etc) for it because of that, just forward to my house IP via godaddy.

[psnsonixx]

lol, you have your dyn ip registered as dns servers? ..lolololol that's awesome.

[Yorlan]

Most dynamic DNS services offer record updating scripts and/or requests for Linux, such as EveryDNS. I think some companies even offer Windows software, though don't quote me on that. It's not uncommon for people to use their personal home servers on the internet with these services.

Regardless, I fail to see how querying the database directly via SSH tunneling is not practical if you have that option? It's securer and transmits considerably smaller bits of bandwidth compared to an HTTP request.

[psnsonixx]

It's not practical, for me, because I plan on making this available to the masses.. I can't imagine trying to get people to setup a putty ssh tunnel...

also the amount of data transferred will be the same except the http header, and that may be offset by the encryption of all that data via ssh don't you think? Kinda pointless because I'd probably do it over httpS anyway but just saying.