Saturday, February 22, 2014

Red Dragon Re-Opening

Despite my enthusiastic plans to open this weekend, Red Dragon will re-open next weekend, and start Bi-weekly dance party's. The first one will be held at Red Dragon "Club X" region, on saturday the 1st of March, which will be the "formal" Re-opening of  Red Dragon.

I was actually planning to open this weekend, but after going through all logs of the loadtest, there are some things i want to address first. Also this weekend is packed with events already, and as stated in the previous post, i don't feel the need to compete / interfere with any other events. (I'd rather visit those).
Tonight there is a party in Posh "Prims Club" at 1 PM grid time, with DJ Ladyjo Martin, and at 5 PM Ladyjo is throwing in another set at "The Sunburst". Every sunday there is a live event at the Maritime, details on that will likely be posted on OSgrid's Forums , so really no need to be bored this weekend. 

Apart for the Red Dragon club firing up, i have another plan, but need some help of OSgrid's current DJ's and club owners. I would really like to start "Red Dragon On Tour" .
The tour should become a series of event i have been planning for a little while. In that tour, i want to visit a different club each 2 weeks, spin a (themed) set of 1 hour maximum, after which the "resident DJ" takes over.  I have discussed it with some club owners and DJ's already, and most seem to like the plan, so were going to try and make it happen. For now, i have 4 places willing to participate, so if you own a club, are a DJ or just would like to throw a party, and you like the idea, get in touch. The "finale" of this tour will hopefully take place on Event Plaza, after months of paryt-ing in all the clubs OSG has.
Apart from the events, i think it's a nice way to find a structured way to liven up OSG with events, keep drama far away by excluding conflicting interests, as well as being able to "serve" all time zones. In the end, we ARE the "community", so might just as well make it great to be here. Also clubs have the best tools to do community building, and i think that if we get off our islands and collaborate more, we could have more fun than we do, next to making OSG more appealing to "fresh blood". 

Since i'm around for some years, people often ask me why i didnt ever run events in my huge builds. The answer is simple, my machine didn't have the power to do so. And with only 3 clubs organising "regular" events, the tour was also not really an option. Now  i have all the abilities, and there are more clubs popping up and getting alive, there are no excuses to not to go for it. Time only will prove if there is sufficient animo, but doesn't hurt to try. 

If you need more power, want to be online 24/7 or just want to unload your DSL line, read along carefully. My regions are now hosted by Kris Terrien, and so could yours. You can find more information on specs and pricing on his blog at http://blog.qlittlefeather.com/  You can both rent complete servers, or just regions, at very, very affordable pricing. The server holds my regions without any performance issues, and there are over 80.000 prims on the 9 regions it hosts, so you really get Bang for your bucks. 

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Loadtest Completed

After making a terrible mess of the starting time of the Red Dragon Loadtest ( I "assumed" i knew what time dev meeting started, and calculated from GMT time there, mixed that with PST timezone, took the root of UTC, multiplied it by 21% am GMT-5...... and ended up 5 hours off ). We did have a successful test though. The new server is clearly not impressed with any load it was given, which is great. It has got more than enough RAM CPU and bandwidth to cope with any amount of visitors attending a party in OSG simultaneously, listening to 128 KB/s audio. Opensim did catch an exception and crash after about 2,5 hours, with around 20 avatars on the sim, and had 1 report of someone not being able to normally TP in.

To all people that came by (also those that found an empty club earlier) apologies for the timezone mess, and the crash at the end, but thank you all for helping out and visiting. Much appreciated.

I plan to organise a party this weekend already, but first have to puzzle a bit ( learn about timezones and such), and make sure not to interfere with other events. This as i feel we need more activities on OSG, not competing ones IMO. Also i have some stuff to fix ( thanks for all the feedback )  like a decent danceball, some more config tweaks, event poster for LBSA plaza, fix the welcome LM, find pole dancers etc. So it was a good & productive test run.

So partying will start soon. Updates on this Blog will hence follow more rapidly, so feel free to subscribe if you'd like to keep posted.  I will make an additional topic in the OSG forums to update events for people that don't like Blogs, or just never heard of us.

After 3 years of building, were going to put some more beats into the grid. Hope you come visit and have fun. More tomorrow....

Sunday, February 16, 2014

Red Dragon Moves to hosted server

With the build expanding, and people requesting to party, a roadshow appeared to be the only option available (read previous topic). So in 1 week i got offered to DJ at Club Quantum and at D&J club. As if that wasn't sufficient, i got an awesome offer by the owner of the new club Yiffi (Kris Terrien) to have my Red Dragon regions hosted on a "spare" server. And what a spare !! a Xeon with 32 GB RAM 2 TB disks in raid and a 200 M/bit synchronous connection. As you can imagine, the migration was swift;  so as of today Red Dragon will be online 24/7, and with all the performance it needs. This also calls for a load test, and if that goes well, a party. I will build Kris a statue at the entrance later... \0/

Faq:

Huh party, at a 45.000 prim region ?  
Yes. thats the idea, if it underperforms for any reason, the test will move to the adjacent Club X sim with half the prims. Mind the region can still put some strain on viewer and GFX, depending on your settings and hardware, especially at 1st login.

So does this mean you're not doing the "Red Dragon Roadshow" ?.  
Why not?  More party's....  this grid can't have too much fun. Updates will follow.

So when is that Loadtest scheduled?        
Tuesday 18 februari Red Dragon Nite Club Region. Also some soundchecks will be performed. Your attendance is greatly appreciated. The exact time will be issued via a Google+ invite.

So if the server holds well, Red Dragon will organise a party soon ?
Yes, in the next weekend. DJ Foxx, and possibly a guest DJ will spin some sets, more details will follow.

For now i have to finetune the configs, enable voice, configure shoutcast etc.etc. but feel free to visit and check out the regions.
Red Dragon Nite Club. The saga continues.....