Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Direct Connect Hubs for Mac

Since I've started hacking on the brand new ncdc I found myself in need of a hub. I don't mind it being slow since it's only for testing purposes, but it should at least run and work which proved surprisingly hard.

  • Lamahub was the most promising. It is written in C, supposed to run on just about every platform under the sun and has a lama(sic) theme which i'm always up for. Sadly it doesn't work out of the box on a mac. It took me a bit of time to patch it so it finally built correctly. I then spent an hour playing with it and four clients, believing to have found an error in ncdc which turned out to be a bug in the hub. Needless to say i was annoyed and trashed it.
  • dtella was up next. The website doesn't tell you anything (well maybe it does, but it was done and the sf.net page isn't very informative), the macosx install script is borked and i quickly gave up debugging it. That would have all been ok, i just started the dtella.py from where it was but had to discard that program as well since it isn't meant for running more than one client from the same ip. How that fits with their premise is a bit of a mystery to me, what about a dorm room where two people share an external ip?
  • MPPS aka Voltron dchub aka Tiny Box dchub are apparently iterations of the same luabase hub core from what i can tell. I got some errors about missing modules and i don't feel like learning lua to debug it, so i moved on. Still, if you are Lua affine this is probably your hub.
  • Valuthub is a now extinct project (at least their berlios site doesn't exist anymore and I can't find a different one.
  • myhub is a java based (not exactly my favoured programming language mind you) hub that barfed on me when compiling. From the short time i looked over it I believe the author plain forgot to include one file that contains the missing class. Since upstream's dead I won't write it either
  • and the winner is py-dchub. It's the only one that worked straight out of the box with so far no insufficiencies I've found yet. Upstream's dead here as well from what i can tell but it's python so who cares.
So only one out of 6-8 hubs actually worked out of the box, two maybe three sort of work after some fiddling of which dtella is probably not your regular dchub.  All in all the usual sad state of affair for OSS software for the mac (well or anything that isn't completely mainstream).

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