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Reader UI of the Week: Crazyate's UI
Each week WoW.com brings you a fresh look at reader submitted UIs. Have a screenshot of your UI you want to submit? Send your screenshots, along with info on what mods you're using, to readerui@wow.com. Emergency! Get ready people, let's move, move, move! We're going to need to get the whole pit crew together as soon as possible. This week, reader Crazyates the paladin sent me a plea for help -- tips and tricks to get his UI on course. He's playing on a laptop, so this week's installment of Reader UI of the Week could be very helpful to the small-screen crowd. We've got a lot of work to do! Release the kraken!
Second Life Saturday grid failure
The grid woes seem to be continuing. At present most of Second Life's systems appear to be malfunctioning. Teleports seem to be broken in most regions, sim border crossings have become problematic and asset systems are showing very low responsiveness (if any). Linden Lab additionally reports that login systems appear to be erratic as well. Login concurrency is falling either due to an inability for users to log in, or due to inworld problems once they are there. Perhaps both. This is a repeat of similar problems over the last 8-10 hours. Perhaps catching up with a good book might be in order. We are assured that the problem is being investigated. Again.
Who let users on the grid?
Remember when Linden Lab disabled assorted services on Sunday with the intention of stabilizing the Second Life grid through its weekly peak period? Well the big switch (actually, that is something of a misnomer, as the shutdown and startup processes for the subsystems seem to be quite complex) was thrown again for Friday. This time, an extra subsystem was thrown into the mix. Logins. That's right, as the grid came up to the busiest time of the day, Linden Lab made the call to prevent any more users from logging in.
Linden Lab attempts to maintain Sunday stability, disables services
From 1PM SLT (US Pacific) until 4:30PM Linden Lab is going to try to stabilize the subsystem performance during the Sunday peak load on Second Life systems by selectively disabling services for the three and a half hour window. Avatar profiles won't be available, group member lists and group information will be suppressed, no group proposals (and we presume notices) will be able to be created, and parcel traffic will read as zero. When 4:30PM comes around and these are re-enabled, you will need to either relog or clear your viewer's group cache to properly restore your use of the services. This is supposed to alleviate load-related problems until additional, more permanent fixes can be rolled out.
Second Life shutting down for capacity upgrade
Second Life will be shutting down in a few minutes for what's been described as a capacity upgrade for the asset cluster. We do not know if any of this is intended to address problems that the service has been experiencing since the last update, or if the work is entirely unrelated to the current difficulties. Additional work include rolling out new search changes, and maintenance to the voice system. The maintenance window is six hours from 6AM SLT (US Pacific time) to Noon SLT, though these maintenance windows are known to run overtime. Linden Lab usually provides status updates on the blog during the course of maintenance.
Peering inside - Second Life grid problems a daily occurrence for 2008
Linden Lab's Second Life grid platform is off to a particularly rocky start in 2008. Problems with databases, internal networking, server failures, system configurations and more have combined to make day-to-day operations of the platform something of a chore. Since Wednesday the second of January, there have been daily failures affecting assets and inventory, communications, transportation, logins, disbursement of group funds, and even the statistical data feeds published by Linden Lab have ceased updating.
Users persevere despite Second Life problems
As predicted, today saw record concurrencies in popular virtual world Second Life, today being the second day of record concurrencies, despite ongoing database problems in the underlying Second Life grid technology. A widespread outage this-morning resulting in a temporary closure, and another systems failure just minutes ago functioned as mere punctuation for a steady stream of minor problems throughout the day - few of which appear to be directly load-related.
Second Life grid closed due to asset problems
Intermittent asset problems have plagued the Second Life grid since approximately 1AM SLT (US Pacific) today. Residents report problems taking objects, rezzing objects, accessing inventory and creating/modifying objects. At 5:29AM SLT, Linden Lab acknowledged the problem, and reported that they were investigating. However, Linden Lab closed grid logins, and disconnected users slightly over an hour later, at 6:53AM SLT. No ETA on repairs, or details as to the nature of the problem are available to us at the present time.
Emergency shutdown for Second Life [UPDATED]
Due to unexpected problems with the asset system, Second Life underwent an emergency shutdown at 1:00PM SLT (US Pacific). Technically, the grid itself was not shut down, but logins were closed and all users were forcibly logged out in order to address the asset problems. Grid logins were restored at 1:45PM SLT and the grid status switched back to OPEN at that time - however, the Linden Lab blog entry with the notice and with status updates as to the progress of the work did not appear on the blog until 2:25PM SLT, at the time the work was completed, and cites 2:02PM SLT as the reopening time for logins. Update: 3:30PM SLT - Residents are reporting the same asset problems that prompted the shutdown earlier this-afternoon. Update: 4:00PM SLT - Linden Lab says: " Please do not use inventory related actions at this time" - that's got to be a bit of a barrier. Update: 5:20PM SLT - 28,000 or so users logged out while things were being worked on (the messages we got from some users were very frustrated - others seemed more patient and resigned). Linden Lab reports that the issue is now resolved! Again.
Linden Lab struggling to keep Second Life simulators up today
It looks like yesterday's sudden fix to deployed Second Life systems might have caused more problems than it solved. In the early hours of this-morning around 3AM SLT (US Pacific), large numbers of simulators started going off the air, and not coming back online. While Linden Lab said they'd nearly gotten on top of the problem at 3:56AM SLT, things continued to be somewhat rocky, and at 6:50AM SLT things have started to get rather worse - with quite a number of users saying that they're opting to ride it out offline.
Very short notice rolling restart for the Second Life Grid
Linden Lab Lab have just announced that a rolling restart of Second Life simulators to fix inventory issues (that resulted in some inventory service failures yesterday) will be rolled out at 11AM SLT (US Pacific). That's a two hour rolling restart with 67 minutes notice. At two hours, it means it's one of the high-speed ones that restarts large numbers of regions at once in unpredictable patterns, and that usually spells large-scale disruption. Not a lot of warning - especially to people with meetings and events scheduled.
Second Life grid services problems
At 7:20AM SLT (US Pacific) today the Second Life grid began experiencing difficulties. The usual problems are in evidence: Problems teleporting, unusual difficulties with sim border crossings, account balances not showing, asset uploads failing, attachments failing, object rezzing failing, group IMs unreliable, problems accessing profiles and group information, and slow or failing logins. At the time the problems commenced a mere 39,105 users were online on the Second Life grid. That number fell by over a thousand, fairly quickly and is still declining slowly. Linden Lab has not yet issued any acknowledgement of the difficulties. [Update: 8:20 AM SLT - Linden Lab has finally acknowledged the problems and is working to resolve them] [Update: 8:52 AM SLT - Linden Lab considers the issue resolved. While concurrency seems to have taken an upturn since then, it's not rising very quickly yet, and there are still reports of problems, though not nearly so many]
Major Second Life grid failure
At 5:10PM SLT (US Pacific) the Second Life grid suffered an unexpected subsystems failure, resulting in the disconnection of approximately 7,000 of the 45,000 users online at the time. Users report problems with assets, inventory, simulator border crossings, teleportation and group IMs. As of 5:45PM SLT, problems seem to be easing, but no acknowledgement or notification from Linden Lab at this time.
Grid problems don't make Linden Lab happy either
It's no surprise that Second Life has been having some trouble this week - mostly apparently related to bug fixes and upgrades, unfortunately. If you didn't much notice it, you probably didn't spend a whole lot of time online actively poking the asset and inventory servers (or trying to buy land) - particularly in the early hours of the SL morning. Linden Lab have had just as rough a time with the platform this week apparently as well, with some of their own applications and batch jobs faring no better.
Linden Lab not having a good time - nor are the users
Things settled down considerably after this-morning's breakage on the Second Life grid, but apparently it was too good to last. Statistical data feeds went dark at 4:40PM SLT (US Pacific) today, and at approximately the same time DNS problems screwed up logins, teleports, region crossings, and actually just about everything crossing simulator boundaries. Linden Lab's ops team is trying to get everything fixed, but everything DNS-related has some settling lead-time.
Linden Lab sorry, busy breaking stuff
This morning's Second Life service outage, Linden Lab says, is the result of "essential maintenance". The maintenance wasn't announced ahead of schedule, but apparently only after it broke things. It's hard to fault them for wanting to fix things, but a bit of warning is generally the done thing. In this case, notice of the maintenance work was only given after problems began at 12:10AM SLT (US Pacific), with the actual notice coming 34 minutes later at 12:44AM.
Second Life stability problems continue into the new week
Linden Lab advises this-morning (and we're certainly seeing it reflected in the figures) that while they thought the issue had been resolved on Saturday evening, that it was not, and that the issues that plagued the Second Life grid over the weekend are still ongoing. Additionally, all voice services went dark at 2:06AM SLT (US Pacific).
Sunday not shaping up well for Second Life either
The new Second Life day is off to a poor start with what looks like another database crash inside Linden Lab's array of database clusters. The crash (if that's exactly what caused it) took place at 1:25AM SLT (US Pacific time), one of the quietest parts of the day with only 32,055 users online. Obviously the problem is not solely load-related.
Linden Lab having a bad day
It's not been a fantastic week for the Second Life service (actually more like ten days). Plagued with network problems, the grid has been experiencing everything from strange behavior to partial blackouts of large numbers of servers at once. Today isn't any better, and actually is looking a whole lot worse.
Second Life website, some services down
The Second Life website this-morning is directing people to the status page (which cheerfully announces that 'Second Life is open!'). This is causing people problems with Lindex currency transactions, accessing account data, and so on. The failure apparently began at 2:50AM SLT (US Pacific). No word from Linden Lab at this stage(though the Linden blog and application logins seem to be fine). [Update: 6:15AM SLT - The website has been restored and related services are working properly again according to the reports we're getting. No word from Linden Lab about the glitch] [Update: 7:00AM SLT - Linden Lab acknowledged the website problems and reports that they have been fixed. Also that there was yet another networking failure between the colocation facilities. Whatever is up with the networks, lately, it's not good]
