OSgrid Still Offline

OSgrid has been offline for more than three weeks with no end in sight and very little in the way of information for its users. Last night, the first tweet since September 1 from the official OSgrid Twitter account was of the “non-update update” variety…

“Update: We are still waiting for the evaluation of the drives, no specific progress to report at this time. Soon as we have more, we’ll post.”

The grid went offline on August 18. On that day, I was trying to log one of my OSgrid avatars inworld so he could hyperjump over to Dankoville, my personal mini-grid, to work on a project there. I logged in but could not move my avatar nor access my inventory. After waiting a bit, I tried again. After several failed attempts, I tried a couple alts but still had no luck. On each attempt, I would see the location I was rezzing in – Wright Plaza, for example – but my avatars could not complete the process. In the middle of this, I mentioned to a friend via social media that “nothing is working on OSgrid today.” Referring to my avatars, I said, “none of them could fully rez in on OSgrid. different avs, different regions, different viewers. some error messages… i think their inventories would not load.” Later in the day, I began to see in social media the “Hey, does anybody know why I can’t log in to OSgrid?” posts. Via Twitter, OSgrid confirmed it was offline.

The next day, OSgrid announced in a tweet, “Seems we lost part of the raid that handles assets, unfortunately there is no ETA at this time.” A second tweet on August 19 said technicians were working to “get the raid rebuilt, they have not said how long this might take.”

On August 20, OSgrid issued a statement on the grid’s website that said, “…OSgrid has suffered a critical failure in one of the primary drives in our RAID10 array…” and went on to say, “we are working diligently with our data services provider to resolve this issue without data loss.” This stands as the most recent post on OSgrid’s News page.

An August 22 tweet announced, “We have recruited outside help to obtain an estimate for recovery time and cost…” This was reiterated in an announcement in the OSgrid forums which noted, “it could be a few days before we know the extent of the damage/ feasibility and cost of a recovery.”

The next update came in a September 1 tweet, “We have paid for the initial examination of the drives, we expect to hear from them later this week.”

The most recent tweet from OSgrid, came last night, September 8…

OSgrid is the main development grid or testing ground for the OpenSimulator platform. It is the oldest and one of the largest and most popular OpenSim virtual worlds.

The grid has been offline at times in the past but an extended outage is unusual.

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OSgrid website:

http://www.osgrid.org/

Related article from Hypergrid Business:

Raid brings down second grid: What it is and how to protect yourself

Danko Whitfield’s OSgrid avatar