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Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Time to say goodbye...

...at least to the old version of the hyperbase ^^
Seems really noone is using it anymore, so i decided to switch off the "old" 0.7.0.2 base.

The new base seems to be useful (and used) as a hub and a place to test hypergrid functionality, so i will keep it running.

See you in the hyperverse,
Neo

Saturday, May 7, 2011

Upgrade to new 0.7.1 opensim release!

Hi!
Since there is a new "stable" 0.7.1 opensim release out now (and an accompanying Diva distro as well) i have upgraded the hyperbase to this release.

To allow for a smooth migration for those who are still on 0.7.0.2 i have set up a copy of the old one on a new port. It now resides on
http://hbase42.hopto.org:9032

All the accounts that existed on the hyperbase have been carried over to the new release, i wont do any further migrations of data you collect on the "old" 0.7.0.2 base, so please consider using the new base as your "home" if you want to continue using it as your starting point into the hypergrid.
cu,
Neo

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Aftermaths of a great event

first i want to thank you all for participating! We were about 12 people in each of the two meetings we had on sunday. Considering this was the first time we met on this new base all went extremely smooth.
For me there were some interesting lessons to be learned:

-> the server  is able to provide enough power for HGAC meetings. Aside from the slowdown i will descibe later everything went very smooth.

-> doing a jump with large groups of hypernauts stresses 0.7.0.2 server too. Our jump to TGIB slowed that sim down to near death. I think Vanish will write something about that.
 
-> setting up a freebie area needs a bit of planning and communication. It was amazing to see the amount and variety of freebies that were placed on the freebie area. But... ;-) ... i feel we should talk about what should be placed there. Since we could come up with a sheer unlimited number of good stuff to share this would blow up the ressources needed by the simulator. To keep this one as smooth as possible i suggest to keep just some "essential needs for the hypernaut" here. It should provide some acceptable looks to allow new hypernauts to start exploring the hypergrid. If we want to set up a hypermall this should be on a dedicated sim (server?) of it own.

-> trying to do too many steps at once isnt good. Many new accounts have been created, most of wich needed to have some initial outfits. The freebie area was filled with stuff. We had many new visitors from other grids. All those activities add some load that in combination lead to slowdowns.

-> dont try to pass things to first time visitors from the hypergrid during meetings. It seems there are some ways to trigger a complete inventory transfer for new visitors from outside (i.e. not having accounts locally). We had several occasions where i could see asset or inventory transactions on the console, going on for minutes, slowing the system. During the final minutes of the meeting we even had the sim stalled to a point that chat was blocked for several minutes. We will try to reproduce this in a test session. I hope that once the assets have been transfered it wont happen again. So we could use a mix of organizational measures to reduce that stress (dont do big inventory things during a meeting, try to trigger them before)

-> something builds up eating more and more cpu during such sessions, finally rendereing the system slow. When i restarted the server sunday morning it took about 5% cpu. As the first visitors came it this slowly started to grow to 15-20%. After the freebie area was filled with some things it never fell back below 30%. Something seems to have only partially manifested itself there (something non-existent blocking the path, it roughly felt like a larger copy of the hobo "ruins" that had been placed in one corner).
The server load continued to grow constantly, building up something in the "PhysFT" part of the stats.
At the end of the first session it barely dropped back below 100%. Durind the second session we permanently ran above 130%, ending in about 150%. When i inspected the system the next morning it was constantly at 200% (i.e. both cpu's running at 100%), the sim wasnt responding, i could not even shut it down gracefully.

Enough of that techy stuff now!
The meetings showed there is an interest in joining the hg1.5 realm, exploring new grounds.
Lets continue to explore and build this base into something useful for us all.

cu,
Neo

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Preparing for the big event

as Pathfinder mentioned here:  http://wp.me/p11U98-D0 we will meet on the Hyperbase42 next sunday.
Time to clean up and test and fix some things...
Most of my gates dont seem to work anymore because the target grids have upgraded to 0.7.1 :(
Many destinations coming out of the Hypergate seem to have the very same issue :((
Since we will visit my beach house i have removed some non pg13 stuff ;-)

Vanish & i tried to set up a Hypertaxi between the Base and his TGIB Inn.
No matter what we tried we couldnt succeed getting the osTeleportAgent call to work (thew one that actually performs the teleport). I think it is due to this bug

http://opensimulator.org/mantis/view.php?id=5211
( Fix osTeleportAgent for hypergrid destinations.)




Since this was fixed in opensim version 14351 (as opposed to the 13981 used in the 0.7.0.2 Diva distro) i doubt it would make sense to try and backport that into the current Hyperbase42 installation.

So: no automagic transports, but "show-on-map-and-click-teleport".

So much to do, so little time ;-)
cu,
Neo

Thursday, February 3, 2011

Hyperbase42 up and running again,

but its address has changed a bit due to the now underlying "grid" structure.
The new address is
hbase42.hopto.org:8002:Hyperbase42
and for the gateway to the lower parts of the hypergrid it is
hbase42.hopto.org:8002:hbase42low
The WiFi can be found at http://hbase42.hopto.org:8002/wifi
the new login URI for local users is
This afternoon i will plant some hypergates so those regions can be found via http://thehypergates.com/ too.

Monday, January 31, 2011

Farewell standalone, welcome NeoGrid...

after playing with some configurations it seems to be the right way to go for a complete hypergrid enabled grid setup. This way it might be easier to test some newer releases (as long as they dont change the grid interface again...).
So i have set up one R.O.B.U.S.T service and a separate OpenSim instance for the Hyperbase42.
I will set up a second OpenSim instance for the other regions soon.
Merging the data from the old installations seems to be done now, if all goes smooth the server should be ready tomorrow.

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Moving to the new server

since the virtual server that was running the hyperbase42 is once again just crawling i had to take it down...
Currently i am evaluating if i need to move its complete content over to the new server or maybe just put a similar sim there.
Meanwhile i have copied the databases from two servers (my home sim and the hyperbase) into one on the new server. This means i have all the user accounts with their inventories, all the regions and prims.

It works, but i have to fix some minor issues: the "ServiceURLs" field in the UserAccounts table contains the full qualified domain names, so if i use different names (as i do while testing) ppl cant log in.
And now i have two Neo Cortex users with different UUID's, one being the creator and owner of the hyperbase, the other owner of my home sim. Of course with two different inventories ^^

Are there any mysql experts with some ready made statements like "update ownership of a whole region" or "merge this part of my avatar1 inventory to that part of my avatar2"?

Well, who said this would be a smooth ride? ;-)

At least my experiments so far show everything is running much faster on the new server.

still tinkering,
Neo

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Some decisions made, some new things to come, some changes...

after watching the performance fluctuations, the crashes and some other little problems i finally decided to move my sims to a real server.
I rented a dual core 2GB server with a (so they tell) permanent 100MBit bandwidth.
Now i "just" have to come up with a good planing for a stable environment and move my old installation onto this new platform.
My first idea was to set up a set of virtual machines based on Ubuntu / kvm but i think i would need a bit more "oomph" for that: especially more memory and more ip adresses to have the virtual machines as full visible servers.
For my idea of having some different opensim versions running in parallel plus some minor web services like a web server either a classic setup or one based on virtual machines would work.
So to avoid the extra overhead in memory and cpu consumption i will give up some of the flexibility that a virtualization might give and install a normal Ubuntu server and opensim.

It will take some days to fully migrate the hyperbase and my other sims onto the new platform.

During those last days i also thought a bit about the way i am trying to run this hyperbase42 thingy.
Maybe i am still trying to reinvent some wheels. E.g. the Inn on the TGIB is already up and running on 0.7.0.2, it even has a duplicate under 0.6.9 and both can even communicate, so why should i set up yet another meeting point? El & Vanish also are much more active in maintaining their blog on tgib.co.uk and it already contains lots of great opensim and hypergrid related info. I should really concentrate more on finding such gems and just provide some links and hints...

cu on the hypergrid,
Neo

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

New day, new server, same VPS...

After some disk issues on the server my VPS was running on it came back up and ran like a good ol' 8086 -> sloooooow. I opened a ticket and was offered once again to move to a different server, which i accepted this time.
It seems the move went rather smooth, the base is performing as i expect it to.

Now i just need someone to come and kick my ass so i finally start to put up, write down and program all those things i have in my mind to make it useful for all of us ;-)

Thursday, January 6, 2011

Hyperbase moved, some new things to check out

Hi,
i lowered the base to the usual 20+ m now, so you might have to reset your home position if you have a local account there. The train has also moved a bit and there is a path leading to the Inn now.

I met Jeff Kelley there and we had a talk about some things that might be needed in opensim: hypergrid groups and chat. He pointed me to XGridChat , i will surely have a closer look at it, as well as at the intergrid IM solution i saw on osgrid.... hmm, was it on Snoopy Pfeffers freebie place?

Since there is a new osgrid release out i will update my sim there and have a look...

This release should also re-enable the HG connection from and to osgrid, but i think only for those who use the latest opensim development snapshot.

I'll keep you up to date as soon as i have checked it out.

cu,
Neo