A Server that Supports SSL:
FurryMUCK -- Oldest Existing MUCK on Earth.
http://www.furry.com/
addr at muck.furry.com:8888
I understand your objection to adding more features into the program that will bloat the application, and I see the point in not wanting to add SSH support when it can be available via 'black boxes' or daemons.
MCP itself is another commonly used protocol, along with MXP, and I'm seeing both very common so MCP may be a feature that would be very good to implement. It's protocol is not all that bad, and can even in itself I think support some form of encryption if done right, but I'll leave that to you. I will provide more info if desired.
I love the UNIX approach of 'black boxes' etc, however, hear me out. It's all well and good to run PuTTY or some other SSH router to the MU* of your choice, but here are my points:
1. If you don't run it constantly, you have to start up the program and set up it's options when you want to use the MU*.
2. If you do run it constantly, what you have is basically an OPEN PORT. I hate to say it, but it's a pain to get a hardware firewall to block based on PROGRAM (you can block on the PORT but that's sometimes hard) and with software firewalls (which is all some of us can afford) none of these programs will behave if they are not given acceptable access to server to the outside internet.
Now, I'm going to go into a quick dissertation of why I don't want an open port on my computer.
If I connect to this port with MUSHclient, it reroutes it through PuTTY or Stunnel or other SSH router, to the server's SSL, and then decrypts it there. All is well, and to me it's seamless and I get encrypted transmission.
If someone ELSE connects to this port with ANYTHING, what they now have is a secure channel to this server, masquerading as ME! Which means they have full and complete access to start doing whatever they want and they won't get yelled at for 100 hack attempts or for crashing the server. I will.
As we all know from events regarding all those DDOS attacks, most of them came from average computer systems, which did not know that they were holding such 'Trojan Horses' and 'Redirects'. Which scares me, because if it had not been found out that they were, these individuals might be prosecuted.
I understand completely that maybe adding SSL support to MUSHclient is a bad idea because of bloat. However, if we can get someone skilled at writing PLUGINS or perhaps just figuring out how the plugin language works, and can get that to work with SSL, perhaps this is a much better alternative.
I hope I have swayed some thoughts, or at least provoked others, or at the LEAST wasted air.
--:) |