Grid down

Huh, The OSgrid is down. Only twitter mentions some downtime, but not what the reason is, nor how long it will take to get things back up and running. The message on twitter states :

ALERT : Grid is offline possibly for the next few days or maybe even longer, we are sorry about this inconvenience but it is unavoidable!

I assume / hope it will be back up before friday, as OSG6B is scheduled to start on that day.  I see some forum topics here and here  that could indicate something went FUBAR on the grid servers. Last outage was in august 2012  just after OSG5B. It was resolved within some hours back than.

I assume the admins will keep us posted when there is news to share. If it remains silent with updates here, you can always check OSG's Forum, Twitter, Newsfeed or scroll down to the bottom of this page, and join the IRC channels to try and get a hold of any admins. ( mind they might be to busy to chat when there trying to fix stuff ). Mind your sumilators will not start, or produce a gazzilion of errors if still "up". best shut them down, and wait for the heads up.

Update : Well that didn't take long. Looks like all is online again. Found this on Nebadons G+
UPDATE : Grid is back online we were able to do a quick band-aid to get things moving again, may be more outages later this week! Stay Tuned

OSG6B Town Hall Meeting

The OSG forums tell me that OSG's 6th birthday event will be held from 2nd to the 6th of August. Events and exhibitionspace can be requested / reserved by asking any of OSG's admins or in the OSG forum topic.
The OSG party's are generally well visited partys, with very nice exhibitions, cool new free stuff, and kick-ass events with various live DJ's / performers playing a variety of music. Last sunday there was a Town Hall meeting about the event, you can find the chat log here 

OSG management has also put out some updates in the forums regarding the meetings they have had. This is mainly about hypergrid and the metro Ban, and the legal status of the non profit organisation. The latest version of the simulator dates from the 6th of july, and can be downloaded here.  We didn't install it yet, so cant tell how it performs.Not much more news at Red Dragon, It will take aproxx. another 5 years to decorate all the huge space. Hopefully around OSG 1.0 :)

This weeks spotlight points to a very useful service in OSG, the Travel Office. It's located on Wright Plaza, maintained by Marcelia Beck and has many landmarkgivers to all the sweetspots in OSgrid, and even the hypergrid.  OSG forums have a topic on how you can upload your own Landmarks there, and the LMgivers also display if a region is up or not, so no more wasting time with teleports into oblivion either.

Newbie, or Die-Hard Metaverse Traveller, the Travel Office will get you to sims you should not miss.

the 100.000+ prim Beast

I retrieved the 9 center regions of the old RD V8 build. The rest was mainly terrian and sea anyways, so of less interest. It gave me back 48972 prims, which were once lost on a broken disk. Along with the 55443 prims that exist on club X islands & shops, Red Dragon regions now have over 104.041 prims online when all its regions are up. As  you can see it eats 90% of the machine's RAM, but this includes a viewer, browser, and bunch of other programs and services, so it isn't all that bad. These 6 simulators in the picca  hold a total of 18 regions, of which 4 are sea only, and 4 are low prim areas ( less than 5000 prims). I try to balance heavily loaded regions, with light or empty ones.
(FYI 5 backups exist of which 2 offsite, and 1 online. So even if my house gets nuked, my OAR's are safe now....).

All  FBI regions are renamed and placed  right above the V8 build for now, but they might be relocated a bit to keep space between Red Dragon and it's neighbours. RD builds are pretty huge compared to normal standards, and we don't want to spoil people's view. All regions have a name with Red Dragon in it now and are located next to eachother, so were easy to find. Feel free and come check out how we stacked all these prims into a huge build. Red Dragon Club. The 100.000+ prim Beast :).

Happy days

Almost a year ago, I had a barracuda 1TB disk that crashed, and took down 25 sims and all backups. As the disk was under warranty, I called in and was told a repair would be attempted, or the disk would get destroyed, and I would receive a refurb.
As I didn't care about the hardware, but did about my data, I asked for the pricing of data recovery. The amount per GB was shockingly high, so I decided to cancel my ticket, not willing to pay such amounts, but also not willing to risk loosing my data.

My father happens to have a set of the same barracuda disks in his machine. After 14 months of use, one failed with exaclty the same symptoms as my disk (spins up fine, but the machines bios can detect it anymore, not in USB case, or different machine under DOS or Linux either )  He calls in, and is told this is likely a firmware issue. So UPS comes to pick up his disk, and returns it working fine 3 days later....

So I decided to email Seagate support, explained the above, and ask if they can try the same trick. I didn't know if my warranty was still valid, ( this disk is in my desk drawer for allmost a year ) but they didn't make any issue about it, and I promptly got a UPS shipping label to send my disk  to their repair labs.
And happy joy, today I received my disk back working fine, with  all data !!
All my precious gigabytes of textures, MP3's, my sims, OAR's IAR's all in perfect shape. You can imagine me smiling I recon.

Now I should be upset that a firmware issue seriously gave me a royal headache and made me start from scratch, but I'm way too happy to have all my stuff back. So I wrote a nice email to the support people, with a big "thanks", and am now making backups. On USB, firewire, and in the cloud. Once done i'm going to try and figure how to migrate all the SQL data, upgrade it to 7.x standards, and how to get my "old" sims back alive, before i wil back it up again....
Anyways, luxury problems. For now Foxx has Happy days.