AjaxLife changes

The hosted version of AjaxLife has changed significantly – or, at least, will have by the time your DNS cache updates.

To sum up all the changes in a sentence: AjaxLife is now hosted on Amazon AWS.

In more detail:

AjaxLife’s texture cache is in an S3 bucket
This ensures that it won’t get lost, and also that it works comparatively well.

AjaxLife’s static files are in an S3 bucket
Hopefully more reliable than my hosting. Definitely much faster than my hosting.

AjaxLife itself is run on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud
This means that AjaxLife has a bigger server to run on. It also means that, once I’ve figured out the critical number, I can set up the loading system to bring up another server if needed. Another advantage is that AjaxLife should finally self-correct failures – should the AjaxLife server fail, the server it’s running on will be terminated and a new one launched within ten minutes. The servers are configured to load AjaxLife as they boot up.

ajaxlife.net is now on the same server as katharineberry.co.uk
Saves me £35/$70 per month. The new system actually costs more, but is also much more powerful. More on that later.

As such, logging onto AjaxLife should now follow a sequence something like this:

1. Navigate to ajaxlife.net in your favourite web browser.
2. You will may receive a message telling you AjaxLife’s down, in which case it should be automatically restored in a few minutes. You will otherwise be redirected to a seemingly random IP
3. Log on and use as usual

BIG IMPORTANT NOTE THING: The observant among you may notice that AjaxLife no longer uses HTTPS. Don’t worry – your details are still safe. Since HTTPS is a significant contributor to lag between the client and AjaxLife server, not to mention the impracticality of getting SSL certificates for whatever odd hostname the application ends up on (ec2-67-202-36-23.compute-1.amazonaws.com, anyone?), it was dropped. Instead, AjaxLife uses 1024-bit RSA encryption to ensure that your password cannot be read in transit, combined with a challenge/response to ensure it is not susceptible to replay attacks. Although anything past login is not encrypted, this is not actually a loss – they were never passed to SL encrypted anyway. That said, if it bothers you, try https://old.ajaxlife.net/client/ – although the certificate won’t be valid, and it’ll usually be down.

Other changes made with little or no relation to AWS:

• AjaxLife can now download textures with transparency correctly
• AjaxLife will pull profile images directly out of SL’s search, for speed reasons. This results in a tiny watermark in the bottom-right corner, however.
• The minimap seems to work again
• Updated to libsl 0.3.2

I hope you enjoy the theoretically more reliably service. However, there is another note to add: These improvements cost me money directly proportional to your usage. If you find you use the service frequently, please donate using the button (that will be) in the sidebar. Thanks!