What is the Dead Souls router? It's an intermud protocol version 3
router which follows intermud standards ( http://intermud.org ) and
was written by the legendary Tim@TimMUD.


What are the rules?

Please read the router rules page.


Is it private?

No. Everyone is welcome.


What is the IP and port?  This may occasionally change. Such changes
will be posted here when they happen. The current port and address is:


Is is "secure"?

Nope. Read this: http://dead-souls.net/ds-admin-faq.html#90
Bottom line: Don't tell secrets on the router.

How do I set it up?

To switch back and forth between the routers, use the
switchrouter command. For syntax and instructions,
type: help switchrouter


It doesn't work

     There are a few possible reasons for this, mostly
centered around the router being paranoid about
security. The router resets frequently, and on that
reset, your mud will be authenticated. Just be patient.
If it's been more than a day or so, email me at
<my name here>@comcast.net

    To know for sure if this is the problem, change your
mud name to something unique and reboot. If you
connect to intermud, you know that was the issue.

    Also note, the name is yatmim, with an M at the end
and not an N. It stands for Yet Another TMI Mud. yatmim.
Lower case letters. I'll see if I can make the router
more forgiving of that typo.

    Getting the router name wrong is the number one cause of
errors. Also, once you get it wrong, your own client
cache might keep the old one, even if you change your
intermud client code. Make sure you purge the i3 data
cache before you try again.


What's the point of a new router? Who died and made you intermud king?

    On the morning of 27 March 2006, the intermud.org i3 router stopped
functioning. There had been some talk on the dead_souls channel of how
unreliable the i3 router was, and how we should make our own,
etc, yakety schmakety.
    March 27th was the last straw. For Dead Souls developers, the
dead_souls intermud channel was a vital resource for development discussion
and support. After being down for 24 hours, I decided it was time to
implement a router that the Dead Souls muds could count on.


Why did you change it from port 25 to port 23?

    During testing, it was discovered that some ISP's and hosting services block
outbound connections to port 25, presumably for anti-spam reasons. Since
port 23 is very often open for outbound connections, and it is rarely
spam-firewalled, it seemed like a good choice. It's not like we were doing
anything else with it.


Isn't a low port a security risk?

    It's not running the way you think.


Is this router actually any more stable? What's the uptime?

    It looks like there's good potential for this
router to be just as stable as the old *gjs, if not
more so. The biggest danger comes from the fact that
it's running on a computer on the campus of a university
I went to 15 years ago, so some bored network admin
might notice it and pull the plug. Should that ever
happen, the new IP will be posted here.

    The most likely thing to happen is that the machine
it's on could lose power, despite being on UPS. If
this happens, channel communication will be limited
until someone emails me and tells me I need to
reload channels. On the todo list is a plan to make
channel data persist across server resets.

    In general, however, in the past few months,
*gjs has failed quite a few times, while *yatmim has
been going strong without a single hiccup.


You should integrate your router with *gjs and enable failover

    I will, just as soon as you send me the network code
to do it. Until then, this is what you get.


Does it bridge to the *gjs router?

No.


How does the router work?

    Tim@TimMUD wrote a swell LPC based router that is
basically a bunch of .h files you put into a TMI-2
mud. You tinker with the settings a bit, and your TMI-2
mud becomes an intermud router.
    I got rather violent on his code and shoehorned it
into Dead Souls. It's a testament to Tim's skill that
my crude fumblings were able to get the thing ported
and working.


Is router code part of Dead Souls?

With Tim's blessing I've included his I3 router
in the Dead Souls distribution, after removing/replacing
some non-Tim code. This means that any Dead Souls
mud can serve as a router, should it wish to
establish its own private intermud network. Eventually
these individual routers may be part of a failover
network, but there are no firm plans for this in place.


How do I become my own I3 router?

Read the code in /secure/daemon/i3router. Understand it.
Then modify it to suit you. I won't be posting step-
by-step instructions on how to do this, because I believe
this is one of those things that you really need to
figure out on your own. If you can't figure it out
by reading the code, I argue you have no business
running the router.


- Cratylus