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Originally Posted by sdabbs
thats just to funny.....
wtf was he thinking...
thats like asking guildwars for there databse hahahaha.....
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Don't be a moron.
/me puts on his asbestos underwear.
It is a reasonable request. When I get back on broadband, I will write an opensource login server (if I still have any interest in eq/eqemu). I don't see any reason for withholding the source to it, and I think that all of the reasons I've seen so far are just retarded.
I remember reading in Mirth's RE post that he could already generate packets when trying to figure out the format... that probably means that the login server was derived by reverse engineering the dll that ships (shipped?) with ethernalquest. That is probably where I'd start, at least (or did SEQ hack the login sequence, too?). Whatever the case, duplicating minilogin-level functionality would probably not be too hard.
As to why the loginserver code is so jealously guarded... Maybe the eqclient does some things it isn't supposed to, like report system information or modify files or expose some command interface that it shouldn't... It won't run w/o sysadmin privs, so it is entirely possible. Since sony tech support will basically tell you to disable your firewall if you want to play, security and privacy are obviously not their top concerns. At the very least, I'd imagine that cd keys are transmitted as part of the login process. It would make sense that you would want to be able to ban users in some way - cd keys seem like the most reasonable way to do so. Where jealously guarding code that would enable login password snooping seems silly to me, trying to protect cd keys makes a little more sense. The only other possibility I can think of is that it is held secret in hopes of preventing SOE's legal wrath. As it is, SOE has only to kill the loginserver for all of eqemu to die (unless some renegade dev like me writes an opensource version).
I haven't actually sniffed any packets, so all of my speculation should be taken w/ a grin of salt. I'm still probably going to write an open-source client at some point, though (if I finally go bband again). I would also probably evaluate the difficulty of modifying world.exe to work w/ the hq loginserver. I can't imagine running a public server where _my_ users would still have to register w/ EQEmu. Why should they? What if I have a falling out w/ the EQEmu project or branch the code? Do I want to have to still be subject to using their login server? I don't think so. Since the world/zone servers are gpl, a branch is a very real possibility. As far as splintering the user-base... I don't see any reason that loginservers couldn't pass information from one to another. Nor am I aware of anything that would prevent modifying world servers to register with multiple login servers. So, while the official stance is that minilogin is not and never will be open source, I think that you can still rest assured that there will eventually be an open source login server.