#SecondLife News Week 18

There is a bit more news on the Thursday service outage. A firmware upgrade in the routers is the likely problem. Other data centers have seen similar problems. Today, Monday, they downed the system from about 7 to 9 AM PDT. The revised upgrades presumably made it into firmware and we are back up. And that is about all we are ever likely to know about the event.

Mesh Meeting

Magnum Release Channel

This channel is running the update package many Second Life® users are waiting for. This is the one with PRIM_SLICE, HTTP header size control, and llGetAgentList(). Unfortunately this package is having problems and is not likely to make it to the main grid.

The problem seen is attachments fail to attach/rez. In some cases they rez but the scripts fail to load.

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#SL Possible Down Time

There is a post on the Grid Status page. It gives a bit different spin to Thursday’s down time than what I heard. Whatever, there will more work done to fix some things on Monday and that work may take SL offline for a time Monday morning.

[UPDATED 2:30pm PDT, 27 April 2012] On April 26, 2012, the Second Life engineering team was performing an upgrade to the core network. The upgrade triggered a bug that led to downtime and instability throughout the day. The maintenance described in this post is scheduled for Monday, April 30 at 6am PT in order to correct the bug and may result in additional service interruption. We apologize for the service disruption and appreciate everyone’s patience.

[POSTED 1:00pm PDT, 27 April 2012] We will be performing scheduled maintenance Monday April 30, 2012 beginning at 6:00am until approximately 9:00am. Please save all builds and refrain from rezzing no copy objects or making inworld L$ transactions. Some residents may experience delays logging inworld. Please follow this blog for any updated information.

Emphases mine.

See: Scheduled Maintenance Monday, April 30, 2012

#SL Server News Update Wk17

Seems we had a major melt down Thursday morning (USA morning). One of the Linden Lab® data centers had hardware network failures. In systems this size there is usually considerable effort put into load balancing to distribute the workload. So, with the center dropping offline everything went out of balance as the servers remaining online could not carry the load. The Lindens turned off some services until they could get the data center back online. Mostly money related services went offline. It took several hours to correct the problem.

During that time login’s were closed or inaccessible and the main Second Life® web sites went offline.

There is no truth to the rumor that one of the gerbils peed on a router after waking up from a hard night of partying in Zindra.

Main Channel

This week a roll did make it to the main grid. This is the package with the Inventory API’s. So, with luck we will see better inventory and delivery performance. As Thursday the Tuesday roll has not shown any problems.

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#SecondLife News Week 17

This week a new package rolled out to the main grid. This is the package with the Inventory API changes. These are intended to make inventory transfers more stable and reliable. Features also will allow the Inventory loads to scale better. This is the package that was running on Blue Steel and Le Tigre release channels.

The main grid also got the change in flight height. The limit has been moved from 150-200m to 5,000m. Flight feathers should no longer be needed. However, some feathers will make you fly faster and that may be a worthwhile reason to use one.

If you have a flight feather or whatever device that sends you into orbit, contact Simon Linden

Release Channels

The package running in Magnum failed this past week. Group notices being sent from regions running Magnum failed. This package will continue to run in Magnum with a number of additional fixes.

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#SecondLife News Week 16

I’ve been busy with other things, so I’m a bit behind. Also, while there is news, there isn’t that much exciting news. But, here is what’s up.

Pathfinding

Andrew Linden was busy enough with Pathfinding fixes, creation, and changes he could not make the Sever/Scripting User Group (UG). I suppose that is a good sign.

Content Creation

Falcon Linden is supposed to have a new UG up tomorrow, Thursday, April 19. It will meet in the Pathfinding sandboxes at 4 PM PDT/SLT in ADITI. There is a Pathfinding Project Viewer. It is probably a good idea to use it if you attend the meeting.

Falcon has not added an office hour/user group entry to the wiki. So, I doubt many new faces will be there. Plus the 4 PM time in ADITI is going to cause problems for those of us attending Andrew and Simon Linden’s Server/Scripting group that runs from 3 to 4. It will take some time to log off AGNI and into ADITI. So, lots of late arrivals.

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#SL News Update I Week 15

Oskar Linden updated us on this week’s server updates.

The Lindens had planned to roll out the threaded region crossing update that has been in and out of release channels for weeks now. Last minute build errors prevented its promotion. So, Phase I Threaded Region Crossing goes back into QA. We won’t see it reappear for a few weeks.

Beta Server Meeting in Morris, ADITI

Coyot Linden says the reasons for the fail are not relevant to SL users. I suppose that means it has more to do with the Lab’s compile and update process than a failure in the region crossing part.

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#Second Life News Week 15

There is a little bit of breaking news today and a couple of good tips. I’ve rolled the server and viewer news together. the viewer news is mostly in regard to coming features and fixes.

Viewers

The Runway Project Viewer is version 3-3-0-252906. This is the viewer being used to find the cause of Cloudy, Blurry, and Grey Avatars.

I asked Vir Linden about blurry avatars today. They have found a number of problems that cause it; caching, texture baking, texture pipeline, etc. They understand a number of the causes. They also have some causes they don’t have figured out and some cases are still unexplained. So, the problem is not yet completely diagnosed.

For those parts they understand, they are writing fixes. But, it looks like the problem will continue. Oz Linden expects it to take significant time to fix. That’s the impression I get listening to various Lindens in that circle.

The ‘invisible-avatar-on-two-monitors’ problem has been fixed. I’m not sure which viewer version the fix is in.

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#Second Life News Update II Week 14

There is some meaty news out.

The blog post and charts on grid stability are still in progress. Oskar Linden seems excited that the grid did as well as it did for the past four weeks. May be we will see the post and charts next week. I was expecting them this week.

Beta Server Meeting

Maestro Linden gave us a bit more on the Network Stability fixes that rolled out Tuesday. Some of the throttles and fixes were to prevent some griefer DoS type attacks. That’s about all we are going to get on that.

Hemiptera Cleansing

Next week this server maintenance package should make it to a release channel. The package is currently running in Sandbox Island, ADITI.

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