Saturday 11 October 2008

Diary: 11th October 2008

Second Inventory Down
Second Inventory has been down for the third day now. Rumour has it a server HD failed. People who have downloaded their inventory from SL to their HD cannot restore it to OpenSim or elsewhere, as the SI program will not even start up as it needs an authentication from its home server. I bet they wished they never encouraged people to buy their product for this reason on their website: "The SL™ Asset Server is not absolutely reliable and often loses irremediably the hours of your work or the expensive objects that you bought." I guess they don't know all they think they know about reliability, backups, and server redundancy strategies.

Edit (12th Oct 2008): Second Inventory is now restored. The earlier notice about a hard disk failure has now been superceded by a notice saying that the server farm they were on had a massive problem.

Attempt to Get a Server Failed
I tried this week to get a dedicated server to host my OpenSim. The attempt failed miserably at the first hurdle. The two suppliers I tried (both USA firms) insisted that my Credit Card be issued in the same country as my billing address. I wonder if they insist that US cardholders have the card issued in the same State as their billing address?

No such problems with Europeans suppliers, but I will have to re-evaluate their plans.

Is it time to bite the bullet and switch to Linux?
It is noticeable that server plans are far cheaper if you take Linux as the OS (no license fees to pay, as with Windows). The gurus on the Opensim irc channel also tell me that Linux is faster too (it is much slimmer than Windows and has far less processes taking up valuable CPU time and other resources) and that OpenSim was mainly a Linux development.

Perhaps I will get that Linux-on-a-Bootable-CD and give it a whirl. Or maybe load it onto a spare PC and play with it. Could save me a packet in the long run.

Have fun

Rock