Hello again everyone, I bring more news about the refactoring process. First let me start by stressing how important it is you do not update your regions past todays new release posted on OSgrid.org website. This is the last working version prior to the Refactoring, of which no one should attempt to go beyond at this point. Be aware that if you upgrade, there is no easy downgrading and you will find yourself rebuilding your sims from backups, or if your were not wise enough to do backups, starting over from scratch to get it back on OSgrid. So please, PLEASE! always do backups before upgrading, but in this case do not go past the revision posted on the website until we announce it is safe to do so.
In terms of the refactoring process, we have begun testing on a small test grid that is not currently accessible to the public, but the Administrators are doing their best to iron out the many kinks that have come from such drastic changes to the core software code. We ask everyone please be patient, and if you have the time help the developers to debug issues with the new grid software. If you are able we need people to setup their own mini test grids locally and see what kind of bugs you can shake loose. We have a long road ahead until we can actually pull the trigger for OSgrid and move on, but until then please be patient and if you have any questions or would like to become more involved, just visit our IRC chat rooms or the web chat on the main website (irc.freenode.net – #osgrid – #opensim – #opensim-dev). Thanks everyone and keep checking back for more details soon.
Nebadon Izumi
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 
.
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.
Come join us this Sunday for a winter skating party! Free ice skates provided at the skate shack with “tricks” to wow your friends.
Relax in the cozy lodge or show us your stuff out on the frozen pond!
Also there are freebie gifts scattered about the sim. Go on a hunt for them and collect all 15.
Winterfest 2009 will be up and running through December with weekly events so check back for more info!
Region: southsea
Time: Starts 1400 UTC November 29th – open all December – events will be listed.
Contact Christy Lock inworld for more info. Or check http://www.gridfest.info
We have organised a new weekly meeting for you, the residents of OSgrid to discuss all things related to you, and your experiences within OSgrid. We want your feedback about the grid and your experiences and decided a meeting was a good way to discuss and debate what you think and feel as it is much more personal when (virtually) face to face. We want to hear the good, bad and the ugly in order for us move forward. The meeting is open to any topic and is an open floor, that is, providing it regards you and OSgrid 
.
The meeting is primarily hosted by Dave Coyle, with myself (Adelle Fitzgerald) as a ‘2nd’, but from time to time you will see other grid admins at the meeting. The venue is the fantastic Tower Lounge on the 7th floor of Blade Tower at Bade Plaza. This is a weekly meeting currently at 00:00UTC every Wednesday night/Thursday morning, though we may make adjustments to the time in the future, and even maybe create another meeting at a different time, if it appears so popular.
We’re having a Halloween Party on the 31st October starting around 19:00UTC and going on til late! Region : All Hallows Plaza
The party will be held on a region specially decorated just for this event: – It is really looking good and will be simply awesome by the time it is finished. Fancy dress/costumes are encouraged, but not essential.
The line up so far (all times in UTC):
19:00 – 21:00 : Adelle Fitzgerald (DJ Dance/Rock)
21:00 – 23:00 (~23:30) : The Super Cash, Live jazz band featuring Bobby Ritt
23:00 – 01:00 : Simo Voss (DJ Blues/Blues Rock)
01:00 – 02:00 : Franta Burt (NUTRIE DJ) (live Drum n Bass mix)
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!
