Setting up directory server in Asia

[ann0see]

We had an internal discussion that a directory in Asia - likely Thailand would be beneficial for geo redundancy reasons.

This should replace Any Genre 3.

Thoughts:

• The directory should be maintained by someone in Asia who is an active member of the community.
• We should agree on some shared requirements to ensure that this directory is trustworthy

[pljones]

Just to add that part of the goal is to extend the appeal of Jamulus on "the far side" from the heavily used European hub.

I think maybe the Jamulus client could be made to default (on first run) to the Directory with the lowest ping. This would encourage Servers to register with a regional Directory and clients to would see these local Servers.

Such a change would open the application to future addition of other regional Directories.

[dcorson-ticino-com]

At the same time it may be good to give the directories regional names instead of the present genre names.
... I know ... not compatible with old versions.

[pljones]

What people see on the screen, of course, is just translation string, so has no effect on how the software works.

Changing the DNS names is easy enough -- add the new ones, issue a new release with the new ones. There's not much need to remove the old ones.

We've moved from having no central coordination to adding a single, manually maintained, "central server", adding the automatic registration, having two such "central servers" (briefly with a split between the two, I think?), adding the selection of "central server" to the connect box, then to adding more and renaming them eventually from "central servers" to Directories, with the split between "Any Genre X" and the genre-specific ones. All without breaking any servers that were registering with the original automatic system.

One reason for the number of Directories is that the protocol can't adequately support more than roughly 150 Servers per Directory. At the time all this got rapidly rolled out, trying to say we had any "regional" split was misleading, as "London" and "Frankfurt" doesn't really cover much of the globe 😄 .

[ann0see]

@dtinth I think you volunteered in the past. Does this still stand?

[dtinth]

@ann0see Yes, it still stands.

[ann0see]

Thanks!

[mcfnord]

@dtinth, you tried explaining to me once that sometimes Thai users need a server's IP:PORT because (I think) the Directory is too far away, causing failure of some kind in the Directory's server listing for clients in Thailand.

If that's right, then do you think a Thai Directory would cause the same failure for clients in Western Europe?

(If so, that strengthens the regional Directories concept by a lot.)

[dtinth]

@mcfnord I believe the failure to load the directory is not due to the distance, but because some routers/ISPs are configured to ignore fragmented UDP packets. See prior discussion: https://github.com/orgs/jamulussoftware/discussions/1058#discussioncomment-7949643