Daleken MUD 1.11 build 1510 === Resources Daleken is fairly small in terms of mud servers, being based on a very resource frugal codebase: Diku. It has run quite acceptably fast on 20MHz machines with only 8Mb of RAM without a noticable impact on other programs on the machine (except for a second or two at bootup). The following data was collected on my home machine running Linux Kernel version 2.2.5 on a Pentium II 400MHz with 128M RAM. - Memory Usage Approx. 3.6M With the areas as they currently stand the mud uses 3.6M of memory, some of which may be paged. This is likely to increase marginally for every connection, although a player could not take more than a few Kb, due to string hashing etc... - Processor Usage Negligible On my Pentium II 400MHz machine an entire hour of running the mud, took 14 seconds of processor time. Admittedly this was idle mainly, though adding players does not add appreciably. Boot time on this machine is 0.9 to 1.0 CPU seconds. If the code is optimised then this is reduced to 0.7 seconds. - Disk Space Database: 3M Binary: 2.8M (Source code: 2.6M with debugging, 1M optimised) The Daleken database consists of flat text files, this means that they are fairly bulky, areas coming to a total of about 2.8M with another 52K of miscellaneous files. Players' saved data is on average about 20K worth of data, and these may be compressed using gzip. The binary is quite large when compiled with full debugging support, although it reduces to less than a Meg when compiled with optimisations (and no debugging) included. === Stability This is an issue with a mud server, more than most things. Daleken includes a number of stability improvements and while nothing can be guaranteed, it is better than the code it is based on, despite having a large number of added features. Especially the scripting language, which has a few built in crash protection features, such as loop counters. With all this measures can be taken to ensure that the mud doesn't crash, a signal handler allows the mud to die gracefully and a script ensures it is brought back up again. Infinite loops can be stopped using the ulimit shell command to limit the processes CPU time. === Security Daleken should be run as a user with no priveledges to other files on the system, this goes for any server process that runs on your machine. It does, however, require write access to its own data files for saving purposes. I would suggest a separate account that noone uses, used only for the purpose of running the mud. - Passwords Passwords for characters are transmitted to the mud in plain text, for this reason, no character should be trusted entirely, even if you know them personally. This said though, a password can be obtained any number of ways. Passwords are encrypted before being saved anywhere, using the standard unix crypt function, this is also how they are saved in player files, making it more than a trivial exercise to find a password. - Cheating A fairly extensive logging system is in place and with regular reviews, all actions that have an implication on the game are recorded and can be trapped. Immortal characters have great powers of discretion in these matters, at the higher levels of administration punishment options are quite wide ranging. - Banning Any new connections to the mud are checked against a list of banned sites and IP addresses. This list can be updated online. The mud uses the ident daemon if it is running to determine the user name of whoever logs in, so administrators of multi-user systems can be notified of miscreants. === Problems I'll be the last to say that this mud is bulletproof, however, with the proper precautions, it should be stable and secure enough not to cause damage to a system it was run on.
