Drunken hamsters, unresponsive vps and decisions to make

this is what might happen if you allow everybody to build on your hypergrid enabled sim:

... an invasion of drunken hobo hamsters!
(Thank you, Pathfinder ^^)

I am glad someone has set up a new home for those little rascals, but...
i was in the process of changing the design of the base drastically and it would be a pity to destroy this.


The reasons why i want to redesign the base: this version is located at a height of 203m, with a water level of 200m. I noticed it lets me appear at that height on HG tp's sometimes...
Further the 128x128 location is just below the trains nose, so sometimes a visitor may appear under the construction. I really love the design =V= has set up, i just feel the base should be kept as lean and simple as possible to reduce the load we put on the servers and to reduce the loading time for newcomers.

While visiting the base it became once more quite unresponsive :(
This isnt caused by the design of the base  but the server hosting my little vps is not performing the way it should.
Although "top" only shows the usual 2-10% cpu usage and not even a third of the memory being used the server refused to answer, sometimes causing a chat lag of 20 or more seconds.
It seems this is a typical case of "you get what you pay for". I'll try to find a solution with the hosting company, if i cant get the cpu power i pay for i will have to look for a new provider.

Now i am hesitating a bit if we really should give this server a try for our first hg1.5 HGAC travel.
As an alternative i will place a really stripped down base on my other server (which seems to run more stable, but has only 1GB memory...)

Maybe one of my readers can give me a hint where i can rent an affordable, reliable server to run this on...

cu,
Neo

Glad you told me...

right before i was starting to do the very same work!
I just received a tweet about some very useful hypergrid ressources put together by Pam Broviak:
she has compiled some great Hypergrid maps and a very compact Hypergrid tutorial
Thank you for compiling this and making it available to all the hypernauts out there!

Merry Christmas!

and Happy Holidays to all!

I hope you had some nice days with your family and friends instead of straying around in the hyperverse ;-)

In case you tried and were unable to reach the hyperbase42: it seems the host serving my little vps is on holiday too... well, maybe it ate too much cookies, drank too much wine, or whatever makes a server slow...

This is surely the biggest disadvantage of a such a virtual server: you are always depending on whats going on on the host it is running on :(
It seems the services are running, but sloooow as hell. I already opened a support ticket on that, lets see when it will be solved.

Fortunately there are still some other corners of the hyperverse to visit meanwhile!

See you all soon,
Neo


...some hours later... meanwhile the support staff offered me a move to a different host, but whatever may have caused that glitch seems to be gone (at least for the moment).

So the Base is back up and running!

I will watch the behavior of this virtual server. 

Yesterday we met at the HGAC

and had a great visit to the "Winter" sim on francogrid. During the talk at the beginning of the meeting Pathfinder gave me the chance to announce the existence of this little place!
Now we already have some followers and some new accounts on the hyperbase!

As i already mentioned, please bear with me when i have to activate the new accounts, i usually look into them on my early afternoon / evening here in GMT+1 timezone, so unless we talk about it before you create an account it will usually take a day before i notice it.

Talking about accounts... please be aware that this hyperbase is just running on a little VPS server (small virtual machine) and i dont have long experience with that provider (hostrail.com) so i cant guarantee any uptimes or even provide much protection against data loss.

In my opinion it would be the best setup for most of us if we had our own little home base and just use the hbase42 as a meeting point and a common place to start our travels from.

That doesnt mean i dont want you to create any local accounts on hbase42, just beware, this is by no means a production quality grid, so "there be dragons" ;-)

I had a quick chat with Pathfinder and we talked about the differernt hypergrid versions. During that talk i named them "realms" so there is the hypergrid 1.0 realm, the hg1.5(i6) and the hg1.5(i7) realm. Those arent connected by any normal ways. But... there are some tiny "wormholes" to bring stuff from one realm to the others.

First way, usually a one way street: you set up a hg1.0 sim, create your avatar, go and collect all the nice things you want... and then... upgrade it to a newer version!
After that you either continue using that one, or give your goods to another "you" in that newer realm... rinse and repeat.

Another way is to export items using e.g. the export functionality of viewers like the imprudence viewer or tools like second inventory, then import them back into a sim in the newer realm.

In my opinion the best way is to use opensims built in "save iar" functionality. It gives you a way to store individual folders of your inventory (or even the whole thing if you want to) locally onto your harddrive.
Well... unfortunately this only works if you have access to the console of a sim you are in. One more reason to set up your very own base at home (hint, hint..)

Another good thing to do is to export your shape (using imprudence)

Hmm... seems the more i think about it, the more i could write, but that also means more for you to read... so i better stop here and wait for any reactions... (any need to describe the details of those procedures?, any volunteers to write then down? ;-)

cu on the hypergrid,
Neo

The Base at the Beginning of the Hypergrid

What is this all about?
Why do we need it?
And what is 42?

Well, last things first: i like 42, because it is the answer to "Life, the universe, and everything", according to Douglas Adams, author of  "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy".

This is my attempt to create a collection of information about OpenSimulator, especially about its hypergrid implementation.

The HyperBase42 (this blog and the opensimulator based 3d virtual world it accompanies) was born out of the necessity to have a base for hypergrid (hg) travels in the hg1.5 realm.

hg? Travel? wtf?

Ok... lets start a bit slower... since you found this site i can imagine you already know a bit about opensim, Second Life (tm), the universe and everything. During a meeting of the Hypergrid Adventurers Club (HGAC) we talked about the current state of the hypergrid (see this great explanation by =V=).

Currently we have 3 flavors of the hypergrid protocol in opensim:
hg1.0, the first implementation is in use on installations using opensim up to version 0.6.
hg1.5 (i6) was introduced with the 0.7 update
hg1.5 (i7) is the latest and came with 0.7.1

All those are not compatible with each others :(

Since the HGAC is based on a 0.6.9 opensim (Jokaydia Grid) i offered to set up a 0.7.0.2 based sim as a starting point for travels into the hg1.5 realm.

Well... i slowly started to realize the is a lot of information about opensim, the hypergrid and everything out there, but it seems to be splattered all over the net.

So here is my suggestion: let us gather people who share interest in the hypergrid technology, adventurers, developers, media specialists... and set up a knowledge base and a home base in the hypergrid to boost the developing net of the future!

My idea is to join forces, provide info, check out new places to visit, help the developers to catch bugs... much more than i could ever do on my own. So i need YOU, your time and knowledge, your creativity to build this into something useful for us all.

So far i have set up a little two sim installation at secondlife://hbase42.hopto.org:9042
If you dont have an account on a hg1.5 grid yet you can create one at the Base (http://hbase42.hopto.org:9042/wifi) (I have to activate them, so it might take a bit until you can login)