Portal

[Plinko]

Pretty much! There's good info here.
http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Portal

Also a good spot for my primer on obsidian farming. I've actually never built a portal yet.

Get yourself 8 buckets, fill one with water. Take those buckets and a diamond pick to your lava lake. Make yourself a 8 long x2 deep x1 wide trough in the nearby stone/dirt gravel. At one end, place one stone so that end is only one deep. Take your 8 buckets and fill them with lava from the lake 9note you can only pick up the still surface lava or the original block of a lava spring. Dump one lava bucket into each 2-deep space of the trough. You now have a trough of lava. Dump your water bucket in the 1-deep space. The water will flow over the lava and turn it to obsidian. Pick the water back up in he bucket and mine out the 7 blocks of obsidian. Repeat until you've drained the lava lake or you get tired of it.

[Dog]

Portal made!

Haven't tried it yet but the Wiki suggests that it doesn't work in multiplayer.
Wow, does obsidian ever take a long time to mine!

[TheCarpe]

Takes 15 seconds with a diamond pick for one block. So yeah, you gotta want it

And yeah, I'm not sure too much about the server-side aspect of the Nether portals, but I know Masakari had them off for a reason. Or maybe they're not working globally. I dunno.

[Ixtab]

I have been mining obsidian for days and days, trying to get enough for my project... it really does take forever. I plan to make a portal too, in case they do end up working eventually... Even if they are never fixed though, they can make interesting windows... or doorways... or something...

[Dog]

Obsidian mining just got harder!
With the drop tool bug now fixed....

[Masakari]

The Neather can be accessed in MP.....but you can't have the Neather and the regular world simulating on the same server. Thus, turning Neather on via the config line just puts people in the Neather - most of the time without any inventory.

As well, last time I tried rendering the Neather on a server it just created a flat world of sand. Methinks it's still a bug.

[Dog]

I turned the Nether on today on TV5, to see, and it immediately spawned me with all the lava and weird colours, without going through the portal.

Turned it off again, as Slip would have been apoplectic!

[Plinko]

I hope they fix that at some point, I wonder if it would require a separate server process so one was running the world and one the Nether?

[Masakari]

Yeah, I imagine it's going to take a major code rewrite to have both worlds spawned at the same time.

[Slipstream]

I turned the Nether on today on TV5, to see, and it immediately spawned me with all the lava and weird colours, without going through the portal.

Turned it off again, as Slip would have been apoplectic!

What is this....I don't even....

[Ihmhi]

The Nether is a difficult problem on Minecraft.

Think of a Minecraft server just like a TF2 server - you can only have one map on at a time. The Nether is another map.

Basically, from what I know, Notch plans to add functionality so a portal can take you from one server to another. This would be useful for, say, the Nether; you could run a normal server and a Nether server. But it could also be used for things like moving between server A and server B without having to enter in an IP.

He didn't explicitly say as much, but I have the feeling that the Nether was more about Notch trying to figure out how to make portals/moving between maps work more than creating the Nether itself.