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.

Clean the mean Machine

Last week my machine had a crash.Windows locked up, and i got a bluescreen at restart. No need to say this made me slightly uncomfortable, as last time it did such thing i lost a 1 TB HDD with 25 sims and all backups. Since the bluescreen just flashed ( no chance to read it ), safe mode wouldn't work, and resetting BIOS to default didn't help too much either, i figured to open up the casing and see how things were.

I opened the sidepanel, and found a dead cat... or something hairy dusty and filthy.
So i disconnected all, took all the drives RAM and cards out, and had fun for an hour with some swabs, an old toothbrush (very handy), a can of sprayduster and the vacuum cleaner. Geez the thing was Nasty.
After I reconnected all cabling and re-inserted the RAM and all cards, the bluescreen was no longer there. Good fix, although it took a while.

Anyways, my tip of the day to keep your simulators up and running : If you never opened your casing in the last 3-6  months, you might want to consider doing the same. With warmer weather coming, it's not a bad idea to cleanout your machine a bit. Mine is almost 17 degrees cooler, now the fans generate airflow rather than dustflow.

I know it's a dirty job, but it gets worse if you wait. Go give your machine some love, so it can keep serving you, and me, and all others in the metaverse.

Partners, Password resets & Purging sims

OSG has made some changes. As of valantines day, it's possible to "hook up" with your virtual lover. You can now partner by logging into the OSG website, choosing account / partner and specify the name of the lucky person that accompanies you in your virtual travels. If he / she accepts, you are officially registered as partners. The one benefit this has, is that you can let the partner know in a subtile way your through with em, by simply breaking your partnership.....

Also you get the option to change email adres and passwords. You might want to do this some day, as your already using yours for over 3,4,5 years now ?
Furthermore you can now Purge any region you own from the map. It crashed ? Lost the UUID to it ? or simply want to remove it from the map ? Now you can, by logging in to your account on the website.

New goodies like the stuff above you can find in the  weekly briefings in OSG forums. Last but not least there is a new realease of 0.7.6 you can download it here.  ( Keep in mind the INI changes from the last topic. If you crash and burn at boot, check your configurations ! ) .

INI changes in new release of OSG

In  the next OSG release ( 0-7-6-dev-e70c71a ) there are some changes to the ini files. Read the OSgrid news page  for updates on what has changed.  Your current / old config will still work, but you want to keep track of these changes to not get stuck eventually, when upgrading your simulators. Also you miss out on the added functionality when you dont make these changes.

For questions, and help, you can vist IRC freenode #osgrid ( scroll down to the bottom of this page ) or ask any of the greeters / admins in one of the plaza's.

We upgraded our regions to the previous 7.6 as this just came out half an hour ago. Red Dragon Club is running in it's own instance now, which should improve performance. We expect to hit 30.000 prims this month, as were gradually working on details and eyecandy. If you visit, you want Ultra settings to make your GFX card work for it's money.

Every once and a while i get IM's / notecards telling me my sims are down. I am aware of it. If the Red Dragon regions are down, it's generally because of banthwidth requirements for other stuff. Red Dragon exists in many other games, as clan, kinship or group. Generally we only recruit dutch members, as most of the games we play have different servers for different regions of the world, and dutch people understand our gibberish on teamspeak a lot better. Check the pages below for more "Red Dragon" action.


Red Dragon Clan      World of Tanks
Red Dragon Kinship  Lord of the Rings