Subject: WizardMOO

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 1992 08:02:38 -0800

I'm thinking of opening a MOO where everyone who connects is a 
wizard, but the db is restored once a week.  The idea is to
help people who don't have the hardware or disk space to
bring up their own MOO to learn about the system.

Is this a good idea?

I don't mind if someone crashes the moo or trashes it...  the idea is
that if someone does, no one will be able to use it until the next
automatic restore.  But I do need to make sure that no one finds a way
to crash the machine that it is running on.

What precautions should I take?  

One obvious one is to run it from an account with a quota enforced, so
someone can't just bloat the db to take up our whole drive.
And obviously outbound_network will be disabled!

Someone here has expressed a concern that publicly announcing
it will open our machine to the scrutiny of crackers.  Is this
worth worrying about?

-- Amy

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From: Judy Anderson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 1992 09:13:00 -0800

Date: Mon, 16 Nov 1992 11:02 EST
    From:	[email-masked]

If by "public" you mean "moo-cows", I would say there's no real danger.
Indeed, ChaosMOO was up over the summer, an everyone-is-a-wizard moo,
and it really had no problems other than idiots recycling objects by
mistake and toading each other; with your plan there's no problem with
that.  If by "public" you mean "rec.games.mud", then there's the
potential that crackers will try to play.  But with
open_network_connection disabled, there really isn't that much that a
cracker can use the moo for.  If you mean people will say "wow!  There's
a machine named media-lab.media.mit.edu that I could go telnet to!"
because of this announcement, well, I hope nobody from the machine posts
on the net in that case; this is hardly different!

I'd say go for it, even on rec.games.mud.  If it doesn't work out,
change the port number and announce only on moo-cows...

Hmmm.  Actually someone could crash your machine despite the disk quota
by bloating the db; the checkpoint will simply fail, but those objects
will be in memory.  Hopefully instead of crashing the machine when you
run out of swap space, it will crash the MOO program instead.  Anyone
care to offer data points on this?  Presumably this has happened to
LambdaMOO...  Enormous amounts of CPU time could also be used up by the
MOO, which could impact the performance for other users of the machine.

---

From: Pavel Curtis <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 1992 17:38:04 -0800

> Date:	Mon, 16 Nov 1992 09:13:00 -0800
> From:	Judy Anderson <[email-masked]>

> MOO, which could impact the performance for other users of the machine.

When the server uses up a lot of virtual memory, all programs running on that
machine risk having memory allocations fail.  If the server itself fails on
some memory allocation, it panics, halting.

	Pavel/Haakon