Second Life Grid Status Reports

The ninth iteration of the 1.22 Viewer, Release Candidate 8, has been released.  If you have been using Release Candidate 7, you will be required to update to RC8.  As is the case with all 1.22 Release Candidate viewers, RC8 may be installed along side the official 1.21 viewer.

RC8 includes a number of voice improvements, as well as support for OpenAL.  Complete release notes can be found at:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Release_Notes/Second_Life_Release_Candidate/1.22

While we’ve made many improvements, we still need your help in identifying new bugs, finding crash cases, and providing final feedback as we prepare to release the official 1.22 Viewer - very soon!

Please keep in mind that participation in the viewer Release Candidate cycle is entirely optional.  If you wish to take part, just download the Release Candidate from the following web page and start experimenting:

http://secondlife.com/support/downloads.php#download-Testviewers

You can participate in discussions about this Release Candidate here in the SL Forums.

Don’t forget… if you find new issues, please report them at jira.secondlife.com.  When submitting new issues, be sure to set the “Affects Version/s” to “1.22 Release Candidate” and follow the instructions to paste your system information into the “Environment” field.  We’re only able to investigate bugs that are reported in this way.

The Public Jira will be down for approximately 10 minutes starting at 1am PST on February 6th.  We will update as necessary if any plans change.

Update Feb 05 12:35pm: The second-half rolling restart is complete

Update Feb 05 07:04am: The second-half rolling restart has begun.

Update Feb 04 09:49am: The first-half rolling restart is complete.

Update Feb 04 07:00AM: The first-half rolling restart has begun. Odd numbered hosts are being restarted this morning.

Update Feb 03 11:00AM: The pilot rolling restart completed this morning at 9:30AM.

[30th January 2009 5:20PM Pacific]  There will be a rolling restart to deploy server version 1.25.5 to the production Second Life environment. It will follow this schedule:

• Tue, Feb 3, 8-10am : a pilot group of ~3000 regions will be restarted
• Wed, Feb 4, 7-11am : half of Second Life will be restarted
• Thu, Feb 5, 7-11am : the remainder of Second Life will be restarted

As in all rolling restarts, each region will be restarted once. If your region stays down for more than 20 or 30 minutes, please contact support. Once the rolling restart has begun, there is no way to delay the restart for any individual region.

The version of Second Life that will be deployed in this rolling restart is already on the “Second Life Beta Server” regions of the Preview Grid; you may log in there to try out the new server before it hits the production Second Life environment.

There is a thread in the forums where you may ask questions about or discuss this rolling restart.

[18:31pm PST] [RESOLVED] The network issues have been resolved and the regions are now back online.

[18:00pm PST] Teleport issues, some regions offline

We are currently experiencing network difficulties. As a result, some regions are showing as offline or unreachable. There may also be problems with teleports and region crossings. Our technicians are working to resolve the issue. Check back for updates.

[RESOLVED 18:25pm PST] Inworld issues have been resolved.

[UPDATED 14:35] The issue appears to be network related.  As a precaution, please refrain from making purchases or rezzing no copy items until the issue is resolved.

We are investigating reports of failed teleports and Searches.  Please monitor this post for updates and further information.

[RESOLVED 04:13 am PST] The maintenance has concluded, and voice services are back.

Our voice service vendor is performing a scheduled maintenance today between 2 and 4 am PST. We will let you know as soon as they’re finished.

[RESOLVED - 3:12 PM Pacific] We haven’t seen any further complications, and are closing this issue as resolved. Thank you for your patience in this matter.

[2:53 PM Pacific] One of our utility servers is having issues, which will report inaccurate concurrency counts and group chat problems, and may cause login issues. We are working on the issue, and will report when it is fixed.  You may receive a message of “Unable to connect to simulator” during login, which we believe is related to this problem.

Back in early December, we blogged to let you know that we were seriously considering whether Linden Lab should continue supporting the Windows 2000 operating system.

As we wrote then, our tracking shows that very few of you (about 1/10 of 1 percent of our current active Residents) are still using Windows 2000 when logging into Second Life.

The vast majority of responses from you confirmed that you agree, it makes sense to free up the Linden engineers from working to support an operating system used by so few Residents, and instead we should let them move on to other work which will benefit a much larger group. The smaller group that had their concerns about their favorite operating system was relieved to know that even though we will discontinue support of Windows 2000, we are not opposed to taking patches that help platforms we do not support.

We wanted to make sure there was plenty of time for the news to spread, and now two months later, it’s time to actually cease support of this relatively little-used OS.

What does it mean to “stop support”? Basically, it means we stop new development for the SDK (software development kit) of that operating system, and also stop doing QA testing on Win2k.

What will you notice? If you are one of the few logging in with Windows 2000, you can still do so today, even though we are officially now not supporting it — and that may be true for some time.

Exactly how long we can’t guarantee, because Linden engineers will no longer be testing to make sure that new releases will work with Windows 2000. So, eventually, there may be a time when some new element will interfere significantly enough to result in folks who will not be able to log in with Win2k on their hardware. At that time such folks may need to upgrade their OS in order to do run SL.

We thank you for your input during that last forum, if you would like to respond to this post please go here.

[Resolved 08:35 am PST] The inventory server is back up running.

One of our inventory servers is unavailable at the moment. This will affect a small number of Residents, who will see failure to teleport, to rez objects and to log in.

We are investigating and will update you as soon as more information becomes available.