Second Life Grid Status Reports

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.

Hi Everybody!!

In our effort to provide the highest quality Second Life experience possible we must occasionally make sure we are addressing the correct issues. It has come to our attention that we may be spending to much time and resources on a product no longer relevant to our residents.

Today we’d like to let you know we’re seriously considering whether Linden Lab should continue supporting Windows 2000. Our tracking shows that very few of you, about 1/10th of 1 percent of all of you that have logged in within the past two months, are still using Windows 2000 when logging into Second Life. That is approximately 2,000 out of 1,407,581 residents who have logged in to Second Life within the past 60 days.

We’d like to let the Linden engineers stop working on supporting an operating system released in 2000, and instead move on to other work which will benefit a much larger group of Residents.

If we do stop supporting that version of the OS, it would not be until 60 days from now, to make sure there is plenty of time for the news to spread.

To briefly review the last eight years of Windows OS: Windows 2000, was first released in February 2000, and updated with SP4 Rollup 1 v2 in 2005. Microsoft has followed Win2k with two more recent versions of the OS, Windows XP which was released in October 2001 and Windows Vista released in January 2007 and updated February 2008.

What would it mean to “stop support”? Eventually we would stop developing for the SDK (software development kit ) of that operating system, and we would also stop doing QA testing on Win2k. Also our support team would no longer be able to offer solutions to every issue related to or caused by the support of Windows 2000 ceasing.

What would you notice? If you are one of the few logging in with that OS, you would still be able to do so the day we stop supporting it for some time. Exactly how long we couldn’t guarantee, because we would no longer be testing and developing to make sure it does work.

What say you citizens? Thumbs up?  Thumbs down? Please direct any comments to this forum thread. (Lindens will be reading your comments and responding periodically over the next few days.)

Linden Lab has released an optional update to the Second Life viewers today to address a potential security issue. Recently an audit identified a possible vulnerability. If a malicious user were able to obtain the IP address and port of a Resident’s viewer, then the malicious user could forge data packets to the Resident’s computer. This could be done in a way to cause the viewer to return enough information about its session to allow the attacker to initiate various server-side operations as if they were the Resident, including L$ transactions.

In the case of L$ transactions, this action would be visible to you: if this were to occur, the viewer would report the transaction after it occurred in the normal blue dialog box. Also, you are always able to inspect the transaction log to see recent transactions. This would allow you to notice and report these actions for violating the Second Life Terms of Service.

This type of malicious action would constitute a violation of the Terms of Service, and would be against the law in some locations. At this time we have no evidence that this vulnerability was ever exploited.

To eliminate this vulnerability, we have now updated the Second Life servers to transmit the messages over an encrypted channel (HTTPS). Now that the server upgrade is complete, we are releasing updated viewers that only accept these messages when transmitted over an encrypted channel. Once you have downloaded the update, if a malicious third party were to attempt to send messages over the old channel (UDP), they would be ignored.

Again, we have no indication to date that this security issue has ever been exploited or is being exploited currently. However, we strongly encourage Second Life Residents to update to the latest viewer with the security patches in place. The viewers are:

• Second Life Release Viewer 1.20.16 (this updates 1.20.15, released on July 24th)
• Second Life Release Candidate Viewer 1.21 RC3 (this updates RC2 and includes additional bug fixes as part of the usual release candidate cycle)

We have not provided a security update to older viewers (such as the 1.19 series) which are older than the official supported Second Life viewer. To take advantage of this security update, we do encourage Residents using version 1.19 to update if possible to version 1.20.16. However, this upgrade is not mandatory in order to continue to use Second Life. An old viewer will alert you that a new version is available.

The updated source code for these new 1.20 and 1.21 RC viewers is being made available via the usual open source channels.

For discussion about the issue, please visit the Second Life Forum: http://forums.secondlife.com/forumdisplay.php?f=350

[Closed - 11:48pm PDT] - The upgrade to the Land Store has finished and is now live.

[UPDATE - 10:52 AM Pacific] - The upgrade to the land store will take a little longer than anticipated. It will continue to be offline beyond 11am. We will update here as soon as we have further information.

[UPDATE - 09:20 AM Pacific] - The upgrade to the Land Store is under way.

[12:08 AM Pacific] This is a reminder that our Land Store will be offline from 9am until 11am Pacific today, 17th September 2008. The store will be offline during this period. We will update you on progress with on this page once the deploy of the new Land Store begins.

See http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/09/15/minor-land-store-upgrade-on-wednesday/ for more information.

Are you following the Second Life Grid Status Reports? If your business, your event, or your time with friends may be impacted by the Grid Status, we want you to have all the information we can get you, as quickly and easily as possible.

We’ve been posting Status Updates mixed in with a variety of posts on other topics. We realize that many of you don’t want to have to hunt through the blog for needed Status information, so in an effort make it easier for you, we’re following the tech industry standard and moving that information to a Status page.

Starting today, we’ll be collecting all the Second Life Grid Status Reports onto that one page. Now, you can check for an update without having to scan through all the other blog posts.

You can also subscribe to updates on your mobile phone using Twitter, or with an RSS reader.

Yep, get your Second Life Grid Status Reports, wherever you go.

Subscribe!

Now you can subscribe to the reports, and make sure they’re sent directly to you.

• Get updates sent to your RSS reader.
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• https://twitter.com/SLGridStatus

RSS: What is it? Status Reports sent Directly to You

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• If you’d like to get more technical, try Wikipedia

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• Twitter FAQ
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Quick Links: Second Life Grid Status Reports

• Second Life Grid Status Reports
• Direct link to the new page which collects all Status Reports, so you can easily read the updates.
• http://status.secondlifegrid.net/

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[Resolved at 10:50pm Pacific] Our Support Portal is back online!

[Updated at 10:10pm Pacific] Maintenance is in progress. — Frontier

As reported earlier this week, our support portal will be offline for system maintenance tonight, Saturday, 26th April.

Our software supplier has reduced the length of the downtime from six hours to three, from 9:00pm-Midnight PDT.

During that time, the support portal will be unavailable for chat or ticketing services.

Apologies for any inconvenience this may cause to you.