mud-web-proxy

What is this?

node.js microserver which provides a secure websocket (wss://) to telnet (telnet://) proxy for MUD / MUSH / MOO game servers, supporting all major data interchange and interactive text protocols. To connect and play a game, you will need to run in your web page a web client capable to connect through wss to this proxy, like mud-web-client.

History

This project is a fork of MUDPortal-Web-App, made by @plamzi, creator of mudportal.com. The original project had the code of both the client and proxy-server apps, and was outdated and did not support secure connections (wss:// instead of ws://), so I decided to fork it, separate in different projects and update them. But kudos to @plamzi, who is the original author.

Motivation

In modern browsers, web-pages served through https:// are not allowed to open connections to non-secure locations, so an https://-served web could not include a web client which opens a connection using ws://. Modifications were needed to allow secure connections.

Features

• MCCP compression support (zlib)

• MXP protocol support built into the client

• MSDP protocol support

• GMCP / ATCP protocol support (JSON) with sample uses in multiple existing plugins

• 256-color support, including background colors

• Unicode font support and UTF-8 negotiation

• To avoid abuse, default installation only allows connection to an specific server, although it can be configured to connect to any server sent by the client as an argument.

Installation

git clone https://github.com/maldorne/mud-web-proxy
npm install
sudo node wsproxy.js

You need to have your certificates available to use wsproxy. If you start the proxy without certificates, you'll see something like this:

$ sudo node wsproxy.js
Could not find cert and/or privkey files, exiting.

You need to have available both files in the same directory as the proxy, like this:

$ ls
cert.pem  chat.json  LICENSE.md  node_modules  package.json  package-lock.json  privkey.pem  README.md  wsproxy.js

where cert.pem and privkey.pem will be links to the real files, something like:

cert.pem -> /etc/letsencrypt/live/...somewhere.../cert.pem
privkey.pem -> /etc/letsencrypt/live/...somewhere.../privkey.pem

How to install the certificates is beyond the scope of this project, but you could use Certbot. You can find installation instructions for every operating system there.

Configuration

In wsproxy.js you can change the following options:

  /* this websocket proxy port */
  ws_port: 6200,
  /* default telnet host */
  tn_host: 'muds.maldorne.org',
  /* default telnet/target port */
  tn_port: 5010,
  /* enable additional debugging */
  debug: false,
  /* use node zlib (different from mccp) - you want this turned off unless your server can't do MCCP and your client can inflate data */
  compress: true,
  /* set to false while server is shutting down */
  open: true,

Probably you will only have to change:

• tn_host with your hostname. localhost or 127.0.0.1 don't seem to work: see conversation here.
• tn_port with the port where the mud is running.