Linden Labs has posted a blog post detailing some of the problems that have come about lately, such as the login problems yesterday, problems that have caused issues with inventory, search problems, transaction problems, you name it, and they had a disk drive fail, but not completely, so it was actually running but just really, really slow, and the raid software left it running instead of shutting it down, what it normally does. More information on their blog.

For the curious, I want to shed more light on the causes of the stability problems Second Life has experienced over the past four days. First, some background: the two facilities which currently make up the grid use encrypted IPSec tunnels (a form of VPN) to securely communicate with each other over the Internet. This is what allows, say, a simulator in Dallas to query our databases in San Francisco. Needless to say, if these tunnels don’t work, SL doesn’t work very well either.

On Wednesday, we experienced a failure wherein our primary bandwidth provider started dropping about 95% of our IPSec traffic bound from one site to another, but only for some of the tunnels. Other, non-IPSec, traffic was largely unaffected, and so this was a very difficult problem to diagnose and, crucially, get the provider to fix. Source: More info on this week’s grid problems

Aren’t computers great?

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