Server

Second Life News 2014-23 #2

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Coming Soon

Simon Linden is working a problem to fix a problem that leaves attachments appearing to still be attached. The problem is especially noticeable when a script removes an attachment after a region crossing. See SVC-7626 – Script object detachment doesn’t appear to remove worn object in the viewer. This is an older JIRA of a related problem. Apparently the actual JIRA being worked on got MOVED into the Linden’s private MAINT channel rather than cloned.

Server/Scripting UG 2014-23
Server/Scripting UG 2014-23

The apparent problem is some timing issue in how the servers send messages to viewers. Simon describes the problem as: 

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Second Life News 2014-22

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Yesterday afternoon at 3:25 PM PDT Linden Lab posted to the Grid Status page that a previously planned service outage would be scheduled for this Wednesday. From 6:00 AM to 7:00 AM, so as you read this, the work is complete and an all clear was posted at 6:51AM.

During that time various backend services were offline and logins were offline. You can see the break in the graph of concurrent  users.

Graph via etitsup.com - 2014-05-28
Graph via etitsup.com – 2014-05-28

Presumably this was the outage planned for last Thursday, before Tuesday’s problem when the login servers ran out of assignable user numbers. (I am guessing that fix is still in progress, but there is no official statement.) If this is the rescheduled outage then some hardware change was being made to some of the many components of the various databases.

While the Lindens think there may be some small improvement in performance they also suspect it will be small and probably not noticeable. I call these types of gains ‘stop watch’ gains, because they are smaller than we normally can notice unaided.

Second Life Bits and News 2014-22

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The Memorial Day holiday is over in the United States. I’m back and staff is back to work at the Lab.

Content UG 2014-21
Content UG 2014-21

Servers

This week there are no server rollouts.

I’ve seen a couple of comments about unusually intense griefing. But, I haven’t seen it happening in my travels, but SL is a big place. I know there are some places that get lots of attention from griefers. Other regions like mine seem to seldom see a griefer.

I do get noobies coming from a landing hub that get trapped in my house and can’t figure out how to get out. It is sort of like having flies in the house… they fly around bumping into the walls.

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Group Ban 2014-21

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This is a feature many large group owners are wanting… desperately. Once it rolls out things should be nicer in several ways.

This is the feature that bans and ejects a user or group of users from a group. Now we can eject them. But, on open groups the ejected user just joins up again and they are back. Group ban will add them to a list server side and the servers will not let them join the group again. Pesky problem solved.

On Wednesday an infrastructure part of the feature rolled out to the backend servers. This isn’t anything we can see now, but the main grid is a step closer to having Group Ban. One more change is needed before the server RC channels get the new code for Group Ban. The Tuesday down time messed up that schedule. I suspect it will recover quickly.

Maestro says that only one region server update will need to go through the RC channels. That assumes no bugs.

There is a set of viewer changes winding through QA and then RC. But, we are getting close to having Group Ban.

Second Life News 2014-21

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Second Life Down

The Lindens had some excitement Tuesday. The roll of new server software started as usual. But some time in the morning logins started to fail. About 8 AM something went wrong. The chart of concurrent users from etitsup.com was given to me by Shug Maitland.

The Disturbance
The Disturbance

You have to correct the time for SLT/PDT as the chart shows local time for the UTC-4.5 zone for Caracas and/or St. Pierre. Add 4.5 hours to the times to get Second Life or Pacific Time. 

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Second Life Bits 2014-21 #3

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Blender – Baking Normals

I came across a simple to the point video tutorial on baking normal maps in Blender 2.6, which is enough like 2.7 it doesn’t matter. He manages to crash Blender before the end. But, the important part is complete by then.

[youtube bck1eU4e8xo]

SVVR

We are seeing more videos of the SVVR conference. The sound in the current batch is awful. Rumor is some professional grade videos are coming. I am waiting.

Second Life Down Time

The Thursday down time is being postponed. See: Scheduled Maintenance. Presumably the problem from Tuesday that stalled the main channel’s rollout and pushed the RC channel rollouts to Thursday are the cause of the postponement. 

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