OK, this is a call out really to all you coders and assorted geeks who can help explain this to me.
Here’s the issue: companies often don’t allow access to Second Life, or aren’t convinced that it’s a good idea, because of the number of ports that need to be opened in order to access the virtual environment. Contrary perhaps to popular belief, it’s not usually Second Life content that’s the issue but rather the security fears raised from opening up internal systems to the outside world.
But Linden Labs seems to be trying to tackle this issue by ‘renting a coder’ to plug this hole. Their request explains:
“The project requires embedding SOCKS 5 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
SOCKS#SOCKS_5_protocol ) into the Open Source Second Life client ( http://wiki.secondlife.com/ wiki/Snowglobe ) thus allowing Second Life to run via a proxy without the need to open up firewall ports. Second Life runs on Windows, Mac, and linux and therefore all need to be supported with SOCKS 5 .”
Now, I’m no techy (clearly) but I’d be curious to know: if Second Life gets SOCKS, would this help overcome the security fears of opening up extra ports? Is this a workable solution?
Inquiring mind wants to know.
Can’o'worms. SOCKS would make the application more welcome on corporate networks, because it is a proxy technology. As a proxy technology, it *also* makes it fairly trivial for a user to obscure their source IP address.
Is it a good thing or a bad thing or just a thing? I suppose it depends on whether making the application more attractive to corporates outweighs the potential problems.
Are people still using SOCKS?
I’m sorry, I’m joking. Anything technology that allows SL to go through a corporate firewall is a Good Thing, in my opinion
Still, I wonder if at some stage LL will be able to use just TCP port 80 to basically do everything, and the problem will go away. The problem (I’m quite aware of that!) is that UDP is really the recommended choice for streaming avatar positioning data and other similar not-time-sensitive information. But perhaps it could become a “fallback” option: try to go through UDP 13000+ first, and if it blocks, switch to TCP port 80. There might be a lot of lag and clunkiness in movement, and would probably be a waste of bandwidth, but at least it would allow corporate and academic users behind a firewall to use Second Life at all…
SOCKS, in the mean time, is a reasonable compromise.
SOCKS 5 proxy support is being added to Snowglobe
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SNOW-238