I was not sure where to put this thread, forgive me if I'm wrong.
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I love the way Google Earth can display news bullitns, weather, local traffic info etc. and when I'm not at the pc GE is on screen like a screen saver and apart from that it's a good educational tool for the kids(loads and loads in my family) who stand there gawking at the world asking endless questions, it is an amazing feature of Google.

I have tried this past week to get my head around KML code and the way GE communicates with network addresses but its gotten the better of me and would love to see a realtime list of server names popping up on the globe as they connect to the LFS master server.

How to? Its beyond me and would love to hear from members of our community who have experience with KML and their ideas on if or how it could be done.

For that you would have to get the IP address of these servers, and LFS devs don't seem to allow that. If you should get that tho, then you only need the do a GEO-IP lookup on the location to find where they are. (It should be in the correct place, or close to it.)

Quote from Dygear :

For that you would have to get the IP address of these servers, and LFS devs don't seem to allow that. If you should get that tho, then you only need the do a GEO-IP lookup on the location to find where they are. (It should be in the correct place, or close to it.)

would there be no way to see the ip's using the port that LFS uses 63992?

E: nope, that would just show that port connected to the master server would it not?

It's easy to get IP of hosts, it's much more difficult to locate that IP in world. I guess you need some sort of mapping database... Or maybe use services available on net...

Also easy:
http://www.maxmind.com/app/geoip_country

As Monk says, it's "easy" to get the IP addresses of the servers, if you talk directly to the master...

How about a web-page that uses the google maps API to display a bunch of LFS servers?

Quote from wheel4hummer :

How about a web-page that uses the google maps API to display a bunch of LFS servers?

Thats not a bad idea but why not go that extra bit and see can we get a master server list in KML for google earth? Imo having them on a web page on a map is too plain and simple.

I have been searching for day's now and it seems the whole GE and IP locations is a bit of a no-no. There was a KML released a couple of months ago for GE(Swarm) which claimed to show all IP addresses connecting to your machine. It was promptly shot down in flames as many said it was not a good idea...P2P...yadayadayada. Anyway ANYTHING todo with GE and IP locations is not out there! If antone else can find info be my guest to call me a noobcake, I think Google have wiped all links to anything todo with this topic...it's odd

It should be pretty simple to simply parse the output of netstat, or do some sniffing, but we can't guarantee that all LFS servers are running on the default ports - infact many don't because there's more than one hosted on a single machine.

The thing that makes me wary of doing something along these lines, is that LFSWorld and pubstats exists because the dev-team don't want us talking directly to the master and I'd like to respect their wishes.

That said, it would fit in quite well with the long-term plans I have for the hosts stats-things

Quote from the_angry_angel :

It should be pretty simple to simply parse the output of netstat, or do some sniffing, but we can't guarantee that all LFS servers are running on the default ports - infact many don't because there's more than one hosted on a single machine.

The thing that makes me wary of doing something along these lines, is that LFSWorld and pubstats exists because the dev-team don't want us talking directly to the master and I'd like to respect their wishes.

That said, it would fit in quite well with the long-term plans I have for the hosts stats-things

Yep, I suppose an extra app screaming at the master for realtime info on hosts will just cost more money/bandwidth at the end of the day.

There is one little thing I would absolutely love to see, it's the host connections list needs a revamp. Its awfull.
Atm, and ever since I put my hands on the demo I've replaced only one background, yep the connections list which is that picture of the world at night, it looks really nice.

On that note wheel4humer's suggestion on the static map may not be a bad idea, where the background is a map of the world and instead of the current vertical connection list there would be dots representing each server in its location.

But then again we have the problem of having this 'map background' asking the master for info(which the dev's would not like us todo), so would it be possible to ask each server owner to place code in the server name to tell the map where it is.

This is all very bling,bling and I know it would serve no other purpose than just to look good, but I feel it's worth it, do you?