   Ladder system
  Ok, I want to implement some sort of a ladder system (a client sends some information to the server, which may be sorted & viewed online then, f.e. points, frags, times, whatever) without needing to have root access, or the ability to install & run a deamon on the server site. I've come up with 2 ways (using the FTP protocol):1. Have a single file with the ladder "database". In this case, each client would have to download that file & update & upload it again, while creating a ".locked" (f.e.) file which indicates that this file is being updated now and can not be downloaded by another client. The drawback is that when the "database" becomes big, say several MB, stalls & bandwidth issues would become a problem.2. Have each client upload a single file with the information needed as its name say "map frags time nick.ladder" to the FTP server. However in this case the "database" size would grow much faster since even an emty file allocates comparably much space (no matter which FS is being used).Are there other possibilities I'm not aware of (having a server without root)?Thanks,-phil   
  1. HTTP servers and FTP servers can nearly always be set up to run as a certain user, ie "www-data". This way they do not have root access.2. Any daemon under linux/unix can be "chroot"ed, so that it has no read or write access below a certain 'psuedo-root' folder.3. This sounds like a real database problem. Use an HTTP-based system to simplify communication protocol (there's a million implementations already out there, and there's no rule says HTTP has to talk to a web browser... or even that it must send HTML to your client) and a database engine like MySQL if you plan this database to grow to any real size.4. If you can't set up and run anything other than FTP on this server, then use your idea #2. But you're getting pretty desperate by this point, let me tell you...   ;  Doing it over FTP isn't the best solution, as it's used to transfer files, not data.If you're allowing players to send their data to a server, why not implement a small HTTP client in your game? The client sends it's stats to the server by calling http://someserver/updatestats.php&user=USERID&frags=FRAGS&points=BLAH&parity=CHECKVALUEMake sure to provide some form of parity, since updating data by hand is quite easy then. Viewing your stats is then done by opening viewstats.php&user=USERID.This is much more efficient, allows you to change scripts and use a neat way of storing data in a database. Also, this doesn't give out the FTP password, and the only danger in this case, is that people bork the stats by crackign the parity.Toolmaker   