Setting Up the MOO: Fencing Your Pastures

Warning: This is part of an ongoing project. We anticipate changes which will reflect the questions and needs of users.

Server, database and core database

There are two major areas in the running of the MOO. They are the server and the database. The server can exist without the database, but the database cannot exist without the server. We can consider the database, without the server, as an archive, unchanging. The server is the program, running on your computer, which accepts and handles user connections, parses comands and changes the database when asked to do so. The database is the storage, where the changes made by the server are stored. The database is also the user interface to the server itself.

A core is a database, specially made with the most general objects and functionalities the programmers of the core felt were needed in starting a new MOO.

What to get

To set up your MOO, you need the server and a core database. The standard LambdaMOO set-up which is used by the famous (and first MOO)LambdaMOO can be found at Xerox's ftp site (ftp://parcftp.xerox.com/pub/MOO) as the files LambdaMOO-latest.tar.Z,which is the server, and LambdaCore-latest.db.Z, which is a basic MOO core database extracted from what they use at LambdaMOO itself.

There are also other different servers and databases you can download if you want different set-ups from the one at LambdaMOO. Some servers that will run on Win32s and Macs, and there are a few core databases out which offer different functionalitites than the LambdaCore. Some of them are based on the one from LambdaMOO; some have been built from scratch.

Compilation and running

Now you need to extract and compile the server code for the MOO and start it with the core database. Then you are ready to go.

If it were only this simple.
You might encounter problems during compilation due to your operating system or other considerations you need to make. The MOO-cows FAQ is a good place to look for solutions to some of these problems. The MOO-cows list archive is another place to look. Most problems have prolly been posted to this list at some point.

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