Internet Outage

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The outage is large enough to be making national news. Amazon cloud servers went down. That affects many web sites and services like Second Life. The SL asset services depend on Amazon’s cloud, the S3 services – AFAIK.

SL login is supposedly not affected. The login servers are  in one of the Lab’s locations or on co-location hosts other than Amazon. But, once logged in you may not rez, the region may not rez completely, and your inventory may not populate.

Do NOT try to change or fix your appearance. You will likely confuse your viewer and make things worse. Do as little inventory-asset related tasks as possible.

Second Life Current Problem

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Currently, Tuesday 2/28 at 10:15 AM SLT, There are grid problems and login problems. Lindens are investigating.

We are on ‘do not rez no-copy items’ status. You may have problems rezing anything.

It seems a service provider to Linden Lab is having problems.

Identified – We have identified the issue as a problem with one of our service providers. They are actively working to correct the problems.

Logins should not be impacted, however the asset system continues to be problematic. Additionally, other services including search.secondlife.com, my.secondlife.com, and more have been impacted as well, and will remain so until the issues have been resolved.

We will update this blog with additional information when we have it.
Feb 28, 10:32 PST

Second Life News 2017 w09

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Servers

This week (Tuesday) the main channel is not being updated or restarted. The RC channels are getting an update and that requires a restart.

[Pose with me] Virile
[Pose with me] Virile
Mazidox Linden writes the Deploys announcement even more briefly than Caleb did. Comparing the version number going to each of the three RC channels it appears they are all getting the same package.

The Release Notes list some improvements and a known bug. 

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Second Life: What Viewer Statistics?

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If you have ever pressed Ctrl-Shift-1 to reveal the Viewer Statistics panel and wondered what all the stuff means, there is a good explanation of the items in the panel over at the Firestorm Viewer Wiki. See: Firestorm Viewer Statistics. Almost the same information is available in the SL Wiki: Viewer help: Statistics.

Network Transfer Rate Comparison

I think on both sites they have simplified the text for the less techy users. I think that is a bad idea, as the people looking for explanations of how the items in the panel work are likely tech savvy.

The first four items listed on the pages are the source of a lot of confusion; FPS, Bandwidth, Lost Packets, and Ping. So, I’ll provide a bit more information.

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Climate: NASA Temperature Adjustments

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For NASA warming is a $2± billion a year business, from a $200 billion a year budget. There has been no government money for any climate study that does not include warming for the last 20 (?) years. The NASA budget is currently being decided by the US House of Representatives. The Senate has had their say passing a NASA bill: S.442.

What should you tell your representative? Spend more? Less? Close NASA Earth Sciences (ES)? Save ES?

You’ll find the information about what the House is doing in the House’s appropriations bill, a continuing measure as Pres. Obama stopped preparing a Federal budget for submission to and approval by Congress as required by US Law years ago. We now stagger from financial crisis to crisis.

A point in deciding what to tell your representative would be to look at the facts of what NASA ES has been doing. Francis Menton has been publishing a series of articles detailing just that. Francis’ latest (14th) article is about how NASA has been adjusting the temperatures from a weather observatory near his home located at Falls Village (Town of Canaan), Connecticut. It is worth reading before deciding.