Linking Channels on Multiple Servers

[freeapophis]

Hi,

The pirateparty community uses multiple different mumble servers all over the world. And its often nice to get in touch with other pirate parties - but you can only be on one server, so we thought tonight that it would be a very unique and interesting feature that you could link Channels together from different server, so everybody could stay on its own server, but the state would be mirrored to all participating server and you could hear each other even though you are on different servers. That way you could participate in a whole new way, never seen before.

I am aware that this is technically a very advanced feature, which certainly needs a conceptually study first, becuase there is so much involved

• p2p or master slave configuration of these channels
  
• User rights over multiple server
  
• where are the streams relied
  
• Different usernames on different servers (certificates will help for uniquness!) maybe a classic user@server
  
• Server to Server connections

Havent seen any suggestions like this before. I don't know if there is any plan in doing a plugin infrastructure for the audio part (would make it possible to make a SIP gateway or similar) - it might be interesting to look into a broader concept to make the infrastructure support input from "non-users" like Other Servers, gateways. This would make it possible to include a feature like that more easily, and maybe worth the effort.

I am aware that there is a feature tracker - but I think such a feature needs a discussion and input from different sides first, and if there is an interest there to develop such a thing, or if it is just a stupid idea ;)

Hope to get some interesting feedback on the idea and how feasible it could be.

[rawnar]

Nice idea, but I think it needs a lot of changes to the server structure.

Maybe a simpler suggestion would already give some inter server communication. By adding the options that a server can connect to another server as a special client. I do not know if it would be better to have this inter server connection show up as a user or a channel considering the ACL's. This way both server will have there own means to interact with this client/channel(leaving the server in control of itself) and also real user info/ACL's do not have to be transferred between the servers. Okay this is not as advanced as your suggestion but I think it is easier to implement in the present setup of Mumble.

[kissaki]

Yeah, very advanced and technically complex. IMHO to complex.

It would bloat the server complexity. And implementation of it would require quite some work. There’s other, more important things right now.

An already working alternative would be using a Bot to connect to 2 servers as one client.

Voice could be transmitted quite easily this way.

For knowing whos in the other channel a bit more logic would be necessary, like an Ice script writing to anyone joining the channel the bot is in who is in the channel on the other server, and who joins and leaves.

For a Bot / Bot reference code see eveBot.

[jfrederickson]

I must say, I like the idea of an SIP gateway though. Or XMPP/Jingle perhaps. Would make Mumble into a viable conference call solution as well...