My Server Manager is a pretty powerful tool that lets me have complete remote-control over all my games. It gives me the ultimate security against all users that wish to mess around with me, even if I'm banned by them or the suchlike.
It also incorporates its own Global Ban Lists and Global Mute Lists, alerts as to when my games go down, when players log in, when players log out, when a games starting to over use CPU, logs all chat output, allows inter-server communication to be easy peasy and on top of all of that, it does it oh so simply using my own made form of packet: the bracket.
What's a bracket? A bracket is a tincy bit of data, of which thousands are sent to my SQL server, which in turn changes them into Export calls sent to the target server, which then replies to the Server Manager via an Export (I may set up a secondary SQL server for the replies, if I can think of a good way to secure this.), how this works, bwahaha I'll never tell! However, I've found it to be nearly three times as fast as just calling Exports from both sides, and it's ridiculously simple to reply to! (Which is the good thing, because sending's quite complex without my interface holding your hand.
The brackets, much like packets require a destination, a source, a name and a password, if the password isn't the same as the password located on the target game, a failed reply is sent to the source address, and they are locked out of sending any more requests to that destination for the next ten minutes. This prevents (Most) flooding being possible, but it's not completely impossible yet, and I'm still working on that.
But how am I going to really make use of this neat little system?
I'm going to whore it out is what I'm going to do!
I'm going to split the entire program up via a master datum, on log-in the players will be entered into a generic lobby with a list of currently enabled accounts, and they can view each account's Server Manager (If they're allowed, even then they'll have no power on it unless given by the person who owns the Server Manager), if they wish, they can log in, via a username and password which we will decide on when they take interest in the Server Manager.
This will also obviously require some programming to be implementented into their game, but it's not a lot, and I can teach them how to add new commands that can be run from the Server Manager.
However, it won't be free! Using up all my bandwidth like that, you cheeky buggers!
I won't make it expensive, but most likely something around either $1 a month or $10 a year would easily be enough for me to offset my extra costs and keep a little for myself to develop the program more. I may give three free accounts out once I've finished setting it up, but that's only if it's done quickly and easily, if I run into loads of issues and it takes me yonks, then I'll probably revoke those three free accounts.
I sure hope this project goes as well as I'm hoping it to, please leave a comment if you would be interested in purchasing an account, there's a demo server running (Currently the master datum splitter thingy isn't implemented) at byond://92.18.193.191:3070
Apr 9 2011, 3:52 am
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Techgamer
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A good server manager would be amazing for me right now, that being said, I'm going to try to roll my own :D
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Techgamer wrote:
A good server manager would be amazing for me right now, that being said, I'm going to try to roll my own :D My SM is down for another 2 minutes, then it'll be back up and you can come see it in action! :D | |
El Wookie wrote:
Techgamer wrote: Oh I've seen it in action, it actually impressed me enough to make me try to work on mine once some other concerns are done. | |
It's actually easily possible to prevent access from these types of external server management systems. They're handy, of course, but easy to bypass and exploit.
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Elaborate please, as far as I know, aside from some real data hacking, I don't think it's possible to bypass this system.
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Just prevent access from the remote system on a firewall level. Or alter your HOSTS file to make your system reroute all traffic to/from that IP to somewhere else. It's pretty simple stuff that anybody that really wanted to do it could do.
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I am really confused, are you talking about restricting access? I assume you are, but then why are you saying it's also easy to bypass?
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It doesn't take much for someone to intercept the incoming packets from your manager to the game they're running. So even if they ban you, and you do something about it remotely; if they happen to know a little bit about how things work they can just catch your incoming calls and disregard them; or even spoof them to gain control of other servers.
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