Frequently Asked Questions
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Why are you doing it like this instead of just letting us use our own local PCs? |
A number of reasons. This way is more convoluted for *me* to maintain, yes, but it also lowers the possibilities of people making mistakes in configuration, makes it less likely for single-person technical problems to happen (Hopefully everything any player needs to do is all completely confined to a browser and their own OBS), and lets me do more wacky things down-the-line. If I'm able to explicitly run programs remotely on the Players' VDI systems, it lets me make more and more fun and intrusive things to the competitors, and I have a LOT of ideas >:) Also, if I'm literally MAKING PROGRAMS THAT MAP MULTIPLAYER SEEDS and PUTTING THOSE PROGRAMS IN FRONT OF PLAYERS I have to make *damn* sure that no one can either access that code or pull it from the systems at all. The VDI RBAC controls I'm putting in place will hopefully stop that. |
| Really? Amazon? |
I don't like it either, but unfortunately short of me buying and hosting my own physical servers, or opening up ports into my own homelabs to potentially dozens of strangers, this is the best way to do it. My IRL career is specifically a cloud architect, so I have *some* insight on how to do this cost effectively and not give Amazon any more money than absolutely necessary. At some point the world exists as it is, and for us to do the things we want to do, we have to act in harm-mitigation rather than moral purity. I think the value of the community and possibilities here outweighs the ~$250 AWS gets from this. This is literal pennies to them, and all the tools I'm using for this are open-sourced to be decoupled from Amazon at any point, if someone else wants to build a full virtualized environment for us to use here. |
| What can you see us do on these? |
Pretty much everything that happens on the VDI is visible to me. Don't go to any weird websites, don't download any weird programs, don't do anything illegal or anything that you wouldn't want me to see. Yes, this is a very authoritarian way of me managing these systems, but any traffic and activity on these computers is happening on networks and IPs directly linked to me. I absolutely trust you, but if the FBI comes knocking, I want to be certain that they're only looking for me for something *I* did, rather than something you did on an environment I provided to you. The things that you do on the VDIs aren't visible to anyone not on my networks and not in my admin permission groups in AWS. AWS says that they can't see what happens on there, but they do have ways to reconstruct some of the things that happen on them for the same reasons why *I* am keeping logs. The traffic flows over encrypted HTTPS protocols to AWS' program stack on their backend, so no non-AWS actors can snoop on it. Every local file on your personal PC is completely invisible to me or AWS in every way, unless it is directly interfering with browser traffic. |
| Why are you writing so much about this? |
Because I know this is a weird way to do it and people won't understand my reasons. It's hard to run a tournament, it's hard to participate, and adding this layer of complexity is a thing people will be confused about. I'm trying to make sure everyone is as comfortable as possible in the approach and what they're participating in. |
| How long will they be up and accessible? |
To be frank, for as little time as possible. It costs me money-per-hour to run these, and I've tried to make sure that the experience is as smooth as possible for the people participating, which means I've slightly over-specced these. |
