Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Various types of technical issues with Second Life
This problem is/was happening pretty often. There is no user side fix. It requires a support ticket. The details follow. The error message is:
Login failed. Despite our best efforts, something unexpected has gone wrong. Please check status.secondlifegrid.net to see if there is a known problem with the service. If you continue to experience problems please check your network and firewall setup.
This error started appearing about last Tuesday, 12/19.
Every so often I hit a point where my Second Life™ experience sucks from poor viewer performance. When that happens I start changing viewer brands in hope of an improvement. I troubleshoot starting with the easy and work to the hard. But, this time I over looked an obvious problem.
These days I mostly use the Linden made viewer and it is almost always one of the RC versions. I like being on the cutting edge. Over the years Imprudence, Emerald/Phoenex, Exodus, Kirsten’s, and Niran’s were the viewers to use, at various times, to be on the cutting edge. That has changed.
The Third Party Developers met last Friday. This is the first of those meetings to run a full hour in some weeks. So, we have new information on several subjects. Some of that information I published on Saturday and Sunday as smaller posts rather than one gigantic post. This article will be the smaller bits of news from the meeting. But, it still went over a thousand words.
Oz Linden announced the next TPD Meeting is next Friday May 1. This is one week away, out of the normal pattern. He will be gone the following weekend and is pushing that weekend’s meeting up one week.
We currently have an inventory problem that prevents logging into Second Life. The currenlty frequent cause of the problem has been tracked down to having Flat Inventory.
A flat inventory is an inventory where thousands of items are in a single folder. Mostly the term denotes an unorganized inventory where stuff is mostly in the root or objects folders rather than being organized in folders and subfolders. As the viewer is downloading inventory folder by folder a folder with thousands of items can take too long to download and cause a time out. This jams up the login process and you get a failure message.
In general people having a problem logging in or staying logged in have connection problems. But we have a new problem. It seems AISv3 removed the LIMIT on how many items you can have in a folder. Apparently any limit has not been enforced for some time. So, we are starting to see some inventories accumulate enough items to trigger a problem.
As things are now a big flat inventory with thousands of items in a single folder, especially the root folder, is a problem. How fast the computer, network, and region are determines when the problem appears. I don’t know for sure, but logging into an empty region should give one a better chance of getting around the login problem. Hopefully they can stay on long enough to move items into folders.
The recent RC Server update has brought some problems. You have to have the combination of a viewer without AISv3 updates and be on a RC Channel region; Blue Steel, Magnum, or Tigre. In this case it is any of the three.
The Deploys thread in the forum is getting some chat form those having problems. But, most have yet to figure out whats going wrong. And since it is region specific problem, it is hard to figure out.