I have always thought it would be great to have both a public LS connection as well as a private one up at all times in case the public one goes down.
The way I would do it would be to simply use the accounts table that already exists and force players to register on the public LS first and log into the server at least once via the public connection. Then, once their account name is in your DB, they can then issue a #password command to set a password for that account while in-game. The new password that they entered from in-game would then be hashed into the accounts table into the already existing password field. Once they have done that, they would have the option to login to your server via the private LS connection using the same account name and whatever password they set (preferably something different than their normal public LS password for security reasons). This should allow for both public and private LS's to use the same table for dealing with accounts, so you could play your same chars from either.
If you wanted to be able to register accounts for playing on your server directly from your Private LS and without having to register on the Public one, you could then just set a prefix to the usernames that get registered to help prevent (or at least heavily limit) the possibility of overlapping account names that might be registered publicly. So, for my server, it might prefix each username with sh_, so my login might be sh_trevius and so on.
Maybe I am missing something, but it doesn't seem like it would be too complex to allow a dual connection to both public and private LS without risking the possibility of too many conflicts.
Luckily, the current public LS is very stable and should be for a long time, hopefully. So, this isn't a huge concern. But, I do agree that it would be cool to have the option to be both public and private at the same time.
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