fwaggle.org

Okay so as I wrote in my last post, Sabrienix is getting ready to offer Mumble hosting so I need a fancy control panel to impress users and show that Mumble’s a serious competitor to Ventrilo and TeamSpeak. Murmur (the mumble server software) now supports ICE for inter-process communication, and ICE has PHP hooks which make connecting to Murmur rather trivial.

The problem has been finding the right methods for the job, the first hurdle being user authentication. The sample PHP scripts are almost useless for this purpose, I thought perhaps I could yank the password from the “pw” property of the Registered User object, but for security reasons that is always blank when you’re reading a user object.

The old IPC method, DBUS supports an “introspect” method which lets you grab all the available properties and methods and makes it easy. It’s not like I’m looking for personalized books on the subject, I just want some damn documentation! Of course there’s nothing in the Wiki, but I might change that myself since it looks like they’re well underway to phasing out DBUS.

Finally I dug through the SVN repository, and found the Murmur.ice file which describes all the properties and methods available via ICE. I’ll probably add all this information into the Wiki soon, since no one else has done it yet. But so far so good, users can authenticate to the control panel page for their Mumble server, and so far they can kick other users and log out of the control panel.

Tomorrow, I plan on allowing them to change the various simple settings such as the name of their server, the welcome message, and whether it’s listed in the global server list. For obvious reasons they can’t stop/start their server or modify the number of slots, but I am considering allowing them to select their own port if they wish. Then I’ll work on controlling ACLs, with an eventual goal to allowing sub users inside the control panel access to certain features perhaps.

Can’t wait to keep going, but my fingers are too cold.

Quite some time ago, a small gaming community I manage began using Skype to voice chat with. We quickly found, however, that Skype was rather heavy on resources and not entirely as well suited to conference calls as the company makes it out to be. In particular, 3 or more callers often resulted in “beat boxing” (audio jitter) while running any sort of intensive game.

So we moved to Ventrilo, but unfortunately the free version only supports up to 8 users at a time and our small clan was rapidly outgrowing this limit. When I shell out quite an amount every month for dedicated servers anyway, I wasn’t about to pay an authorized host for hosting so I decided to see about becoming one. Thus far, Ventrilo’s licensing department has pretty well ignored me – maybe they don’t plan on taking on any new authorized hosting partners?

We eventually found TeamSpeak, which is sub-standard software but free for non-profit hosting. We were happily using this for quite a while, and I eventually became an authorized TeamSpeak Host. However, TS2 has gone over a year without any sort of a new release. The quality of voice still sucks, the software’s buggy and any time any sort of improvement is mentioned on the forums the basic response is “TS3 is coming soon!”. TS3 has been coming for too long now.

Finally, my good friend Terry stumbled upon some GPL software called Mumble. Mumble is quite buggy (but then again TS2 is not without it’s bugs) and doesn’t traverse firewalls well (seriously, just enable TCP mode – you won’t notice the extra latency and it’s not worth tearing your hair out to make UDP mode work) but it’s free. Dual-licensed free, which is absolutely awesome in my opinion because I’m not a huge fan of the GPL.

Sabrienix can host Mumble Servers for profit without paying royalties to a company that’s going to take my money and ignore me. No, in fact development on Mumble is quite active (which is good, because the bugs mentioned above will likely be ironed out soon enough) so I’ll probably end up donating a portion of the profits to the group because after all I’m not paying a fortune for royalties so the money might as well go somewhere useful.

I’ve started working on a Mumble Control Panel for our clients, because the Murmur Server by default doesn’t include one and it’ll make things a lot easier for prospective clients to manage everything they need to.

On the whole though, I’m really impressed by this software. I probably would never have found it if Ventrilo would have answered me, but I’m really glad I did and I look forward to what’s coming in the future from the group.