Opensim: "sandbox" vs "grid mode" => "standalone" vs "distributed"

This week is going to be RL-busy, so besides the auto-upgrading sim for testing the latest release, I won't contribute too much.

However, with the "official" release 0.4 approaching,
I wanted to write about a common misunderstanding when it comes to talking about "standalone" or "sandbox" mode vs. "grid mode" - which should really be now called "distributed" mode.

misconception#1: You can have only one 256x256 sim in standalone mode.

No, technically you can have as many as you want, assuming you have enough memory. I tested with 5x5, but it runs quite a bit slow. ODE physics may have issues (or so I heard) with multiregion setup - but you *can* run many regions within the same opensim in standalone mode. How to do it ?
Very simple. You will need to create the new files in the bin/Regions directory, one file per each new region. Things to watch out for: ensure the database names there, the port numbers, and coordinates are unique - otherwise you will get an unfriendly barf when trying to launch the opensim :) I've made once a multiregion helper script in ruby to automate the creation of the region XML files.

misconception#2: To allow anyone else besides me to connect, I need to run in grid mode.

No, as soon as your IP is reachable from the your friends' computers, and the necessary ports are open, and you create the accounts for them ("create user Firstname Lastname password 1000 1000") - they can connect without any problem.

indeed using anything other than "test" for the password puts you in a very awkward situation of needing to know your friends' password to create the account (and there's no means to change it at the moment - which, I agree, is altogether a bad-ass thing from the "puristic security" perspective). However, as we do not trade gold of anything at this time in opensims, I would not consider this to be a showstopper.