Hello everyone,
I wanted to give everyone one some notice on the upcoming server refactoring everyone has been hearing about. According to Melanie and Diva, the coding is complete on their server changes. This means several things for OSgrid, not all of which i will discuss right now, we are currently formulating plans on how to proceed forward. We ask that you all bear with us while we do some testing behind the scenes to prepare for all of these changes, some are drastic, some you wont even notice at all. Likely in the coming weeks you will see changes to the website and the simulator software, but we will do our best to help everyone prepare and step through it.
That is about all i can say for right now, but in the mean time its best to not update past the current OSgrid release version, or anything you are currently running today prior to GIT REV a9580ebb496637323548b75c2bda605790b18a6b (r/12335) as this version is the no longer compatible with OSgrid until we can complete the back end updates.
If you have any questions you can visit our web chat or IRC channel at irc.freenode.net #osgrid
~Nebadon Izumi
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EDIT: This maintenance was successfully completed. –coyled
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Hello. As Adam mentioned a couple of posts ago, thanks to generous user donations OSGrid has a shiny new asset server ready to go into service. This will bring our asset storage capacity from 1TB to 3.5TB, and decrease the grid’s recurring monthly operational costs.
Most of the assets have already been sync’d to the new machine, but we’ll have to take the asset server offline to do one final sync before flipping the switch. This maintenance window is now scheduled for:
Sunday, 2009-01-17 03:00-06:00 UTC
a.k.a.
Saturday, 2009-01-16 7pm-10pm PST
You can also go to http://tr.im/KwqN and convert that time into your local time zone.
All other grid services will remain up during this time, though the user experience will be degraded as sims will be unable to upload or retrieve uncached assets. After the conclusion of the maintenance, it’s recommended that region operators restart their regions.
Further status information will be posted to http://twitter.com/osgrid
No configuration change is required on your end.
Apologies for the inconvenience, thank you for your patience during this upgrade, and thanks for using OSGrid.
-coyled
First i want to apologize to everyone for todays and this weeks downtimes and Inventory issues, it appears that time has caught up with us here at OSgrid. After 2.5 years of virtually no cleanup or maintenance on our inventory tables, it seems the cruft just finally built up to much.
Todays downtime was a result of much of that build up bringing things to a grinding halt, so after all this time the big clean up finally took place. Thanks to Melanie and her awesome ability to peer into the database and see what was wrong, spent the last few hours fixing and cleaning the entire table.
So please everyone thank Melanie Milland, and everyone who helped her and the rest of the team get through this ordeal, I would like to thank the grid admins and devs, including Adam Frisby, Hiro Protagonist, Adelle Fitzgerald and Dave Coyle as well for also helping and contributing to getting through this insanity. Thanks to WhiteStar Magic and others on the IRC and everyone who helped out on Lbsa Plaza, there are just too many to mention everyone, you are all great people and this grid could not function without any of you. (I am sorry if i forgot anyone its only because my brain is so scrambled right now 
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Please log back into the grid and check your inventory and report anything that seems odd to our team. Thanks again everyone.
ok folks, sorry about take 2 on the outage but we realized after we opened the grid pretty quickly that something was still wrong, seemed people still had some duplicate folders, so Melanie once again plunged into the database to save the day, unfortunately the queries were massive and took much longer to process than we anticipated, we are sorry for this turn of events but it was ultimately necessary. Again i thank everyone for their patience in this matter and hopefully this is the last outage for a while.
Also if you find you are missing items from your root folder, be sure to check in your “Lost and Found” anything we could not properly place back should have ended up in your Lost and Found. if you have any questions please let us know.
Currently the grid is offline for some maintenance to the Inventory server, we took the grid offline to prevent any damage from occuring while we do some maintenance, please hang in there and check back soon for more updates.
Concerning network protocol versioning, and the recent osgrid bump in protocol version:
Late last week, thursday or friday depending on where you are in the world, osgrid updated their grid backend services and plazas to a ROBUST service paradigm (a project-local acronym, dont go pester google about it). ** note in retrospect that timeframe is probably a day early ** As there are technically significant differences in the backend protocols implemented by the new server(s), an additional change was to increment the network protocol version number, forcing a cut-off of regions operating prior versions of the software. This has serious implications for region operators: they are forced to update to a version of the software from which they cannot roll back. If things go wrong, it’s a rough ride until the kinks get ironed out. The bad news is, things went wrong this time. What went wrong? several things. A few fairly significant, a good many minor – no one thing contributed to the problems we’ve seen since the update. The good news is, a lot , and I mean a lot of good is to come of it. We’re seeing memory footprints cut in half, really quick, really reliable on-the fly texture decoding (spells the end of blurry textures once and for all), and greatly increased capacity to endure loads in the release candidates – but issues remain and addressing them is an incremental, iterative process.
Which brings us to The Current State of the Code
There is a release on the website at OSGrid.org. It may, in fact, be a different revision from what is recommended. This state of affairs is no accident or oversight – it’s a consequence of the dedication of the developement and testing teams to keeping the best possible code available at any given time. Many incremental improvements and hotfixes have been applied in the last 72 hours or so – if you need to download the binaries, you can have faith that what is there is the best code currently available.
You can expect that releases will be coming fast and furious in the days ahead. Work continues in the interest of producing some very dramatic improvements in opensim, in the broadest of senses. Refactoring projects that have been long under way are nearing completion, code has been cleaned up, new architectures implemented, and many optimizations of memory and other resource use are focused at delivering these benefits in the short term – so please bear with us as we labor to produce what will be nothing less than the most game-changing release of opensim we have ever produced.
This is the official announcment for the Protocol Bump up forced update, it will be occuring today Saturday October 3rd between 6-8pm PST – you can prepare your regions now buy downloading the latest release on website. (OSgrid OpenSimulator 0.6.6.36c8d558 – [zip] [23.0mb] 10-02-2009) at the following link – [Download Here] – please note there are also crucial changes to the GridCommon.ini file you can view the example here for comparison : GridCommon.ini
if you have any questions or need guidance with upgrading please be sure to visit the web chat IRC channel and ask for some help, you can also post questions on the forums if you have trouble connecting. Thanks for everyones patience on this, i am really sorry for all the flip flopping on times about this update, but i think you are going to find it was well worth the wait, good luck to everyone!
Sorry for the delays in information about the protocol bump, there has been an incredible amount of work gone into debugging OpenSimulator in the past 48 hours and there is likely another 48 or more hours to go before they are all squished, and i would really like to include all of these wonderful fixes into our next release before forced update, i know this is not always convenient for everyone, but I assure you this time it will be worth the wait, if you have any questions or would like to get involved in testing, please join the chat channel and find out how you can be a part of the load tests and debug sessions.
This is early notice that there will be another protocol bump and forced update this week. I dont have much detail now I just wanted to give everyone as much early notice as possible, if all goes well Diva will be checking the code into core sometime on Monday (9/28/2009) night, and if everything holds up we will likely be making the switch by Wednsday (9/30/2009), I will try to give everyone atleast 24 hours to prepare by posting the binary release ahead of time. If you have any questions about the update please visit us on the IRC channel or post your questions in the forums.
We need to fix some inventory server crashes caused by some recent inventory protocol updates. This is going to nessectitate a update of the entire grid – we will be doing the update on Friday, however a package for you to use on friday will be availible thursday evening. Changeover will occur at Midday (12:00PM) Friday, PST.
The OSgrid website overhaul is getting a little further; I’m now happy enough with the Wordpress layout to push this live (although some tweaking with comment layouts is going to be required); there are a number of important changes that are being made – outside of the new layout that is.
The first is that logins are being harmonised – comments on this blog require an OSGrid.org login; and so do the forums now – you can login to the forums now using your full avatar name and normal grid password. We’re not yet setting the session variables yet so you only need to login once — right now you need to login to Elgg, Wordpress and phpBB seperately (although if you check ’save my info’, it will persist.); it’s a TODO item.
Secondly – we’re cleaning up a bit of the internals of a lot of our backend code. The initial Elgg integration was somewhat messy; so we’re going to be refining parts of this – particularly with an emphasis on making our changes more portable in the future (such as when we need to upgrade Elgg versions.); this will mean we can do a bit more code sharing between wordpress, elgg & phpBB – who now copy certain template elements rather than reference them with any commonality.
There is still a lot to do – the next item on the agenda is to move this theme into the forums; and also fix the template for lower-resolution monitors (such as Nebadon’s netbook.); the final stage will be deploying the template onto the main Elgg site – this will be a fairly painstaking process, expect parts of the site to look funny for several days while we find and fix all the bugs that inevitably turn up. Once we’ve got the template in place; we’ve got a number of goodies we’d like to work on – such as some statistics for every region on the grid; improving some of our charts and more.
