Grid Down

Normally i don't have a chance to write about OSGrid being down, as by the time i press publish all is mostly running again. However, there is a severe outage ( the raid of the asset server went FUBAR ) and this takes a huge chunk of time to fix. OSG has been down for several days now, and there is no ETA ( estimated time of Arrival ) for the fix. This is the longest OSG downtime i have ever experienced in the past 4 years, so i'm quite sure things have broken pretty badly. The best way for you to help fixing things can be found here . Not that it will make things go faster, but you now at least know whats missing in life if you cant login to your beloved home, and i assume most people will agree that the volunteers of OSgrid can use more coffee and pizza whilst fixing things in their free time....

Wrong pic

So no party at OSG  today, but luckily there are tons of other grids with activities. If you feel an urge to party as well, you can consider to try http://lostworld-os.com:8002/wifi/ which has a beach party and some other events today.

Probably more grids will host activities, so you don't need to feel lost without your pixels. Let's hope were welcome to partycrash at the other  grids in the metaverse.
As i rarely use hypergrid it will likely be a royal PITA to find my way around, but were going to at least give it a shot. After all, the show party must go on.

The last OSgrid update i saw on twitter this morning doesn't look very promising, as they are now trying to rent a Voodoo Man to get things operational again. (I assume the rebuild failed).
Update: We have recruited outside help to obtain an estimate for recovery time and cost, we will provide more info as soon as we get it.

whats happening

The metaverse is buzzing with activity lately, despite it being holiday season. OSgrid has welcomed its 100.000th user, and in 2 weeks the OSG7B events will take place.  A lot of nice display builds have arisen on the 3 VAR display regions. If you want to participate in the festivities held at Event Plaza by performing, DJ-ing, or providing other forms of entertainment, you can sign up in the OSG forums here. 

A new club called Greeklife opened it's doors, you can visit their display on OSG7BE region, or visit the club directly by finding HRA CLUB on OSgrids map. They run weekly events on Thursday evenings if i recall correctly. Your host Envoy Nikos from Greece, and the Dutch DJ Yoshi Noizumeka will entertain you. This means you can party in OSG at least 5 days a week, in different venue's now. And if you think, mehh these party's have 4 dead boring quiet AV's and a bot, you might try and visit some, and be surprised.

A while ago i posted the URL of Planatex Radio, this has been moved and is to be found in the player section of sunlight radio as of now. The OSgrid troubleshooting document has been moved to the "help"page. The downloads page needs some love, but since it's tedious work it will likely take a while.

The Opensimulator conference has extended it's deadline for proposals until today, so if you want to participate you heed to hurry and hit this URL. You can also still become a crowdfunder , sponsor or a volunteer. There still looking for greeters, moderators, stream and tech supports, etc.

A very interesting article i read is found on hypergrid buisiness  It was posted last week, about Fernando Olivira writing a tool to enable his users to backup OAR's straight into dropbox, which i think is a very nice feature to have.

In memoriam

A couple of weeks ago, sad news was posted in G+ about Cornflakes Woodcock, a very creative prim artist that had his home in OSgrid since 2010. He passed away almost a year ago. The news spread very slowly, as when people go "offline" for shorter or longer periods, there generally just shifting interests / grids etc. and often it's hard / impossible to keep track of all people and their alts & interests. (I really thought he just left to Metro).

Thirza Ember, editor from the Pingsfromtheafterlife blog has had various interviews with residents and friends of Cornflakes in OSgrid (including yours truly) and wrote the following beautiful article on her Blog :
Tribute to Cornflakes .

If you have had the privilege to meet him, you might want to go and check the article and all the great anecdotes and pictures she collected. (I promised to integrally repost the article here as well, but since it has all the pictures, i decided to just post this article pointing towards it).

Cornflakes has left us with his inspiring builds, and some "hidden messages" in his builds. Much of his works have been saved, and there are various tributes and even a complete "Cornflakes Museum" was erected. You can find all details in the article mentioned above. On a personal note, I would like to share the most important "lesson"  Cornflakes left me (this was back in 2011 already, but nevertheless ) :

Regions Updated to VAR "compatible"

When i tried to teleport from the Red Dragon Club to the OSG7B regions last night, i received this message : "Destination is a variable-sized region, and source is an old simulator. Consider upgrading.". So i immediately shutdown all regions, and upgraded all servers  to the latest build. Not that the regions weren't doing fine, but our visitors should be free to leave to whatever place they like, also if that region is a VAR.

OSGrid only made mention of  this fix / change on it's G+ page,  so you might have missed it, but the message is pretty self explanatory. If you want to be able to teleport in and out of VAR regions, you have to be on a region running their latest build. Alternatively you can make a hop in-between on either one of the plaza's or another normal size region running the latest build (software version). This is probably to prevent you from running into other problems due to code changes between the builds.

If you just joined OSgrid in the last few weeks, and just have your first build on your regions, now is an excellent time to create a backup OAR (it's a full export of your region / terrain / objects / settings), and upgrade to the latest build. It's not a requirement, but does prevent you and your visitors to "failing" teleports, as you can assume much more people will run VAR regions in the near future.