Server Deployments Week 20 – Recap
There was only one server channel deployment in week 20, which went to the Magnum RC.
This was a new sever maintenance project deployed on Wednesday May 14th, which included a bug fix for a networking-related issue that sometimes affects busy sims, which Maestro Linden described as, “busy sim hosts would suddenly run into a bunch of networking issues, where you’d see failures creating inventory, accessing capabilities, etc.” The problem can also apparently affect LSL email registration for receiving email from outside the region, causing it to break without automatic recovery.
Maestro indicated that the Lab has a hotfix for regions reporting the problems (although that number appears to be low) which involves a configuration change for the sim host, but the update deployed to Magnum (and which will obviously progress to the other sever channels) has this config change set by default.
SL Viewer
There have been no further updates to any of the SL viewers currently in the release channel or available as project viewers. Releases are as per my Current Viewer Releases page.
Group Bans
The group ban work is inching closer to the main grid. However, it’ll still be another couple of weeks (ish) before anything visible is seen as far as this capability is concerned. As noted in week 19, the Lab will be deploying things cautiously, with an initial back-end host code update being undertaken first, prior to anything being seen on the simulator channels.
“We’re just running some final tests at this point; the server which runs the group ban service also provides some other services, and we want to check that those didn’t break,” Maestro Linden informed the Server Beta User Group on Thursday May 15th.
He went on, “After the back-end is out, we’ll want to give it a few days to verify that nothing broke because we don’t want to roll back the backend service after group ban is on server RC.”
This probably means it’ll be another couple of weeks before the server-side code appears on a server RC channel. The plan is that when that happens, a formal project viewer with the viewer-side group ban code will appear for public use.
When formal deployment to one more simulator RCs does commence, it is important to remember that until the server-code has been fully deployed across the main grid, the group ban functionality will only work as advertised on those servers / simulators / regions which have the necessary server-side code. It therefore may appear to give unpredictable results.
For example, you will only be able to effectively ban people from you group when the viewer is connected to a server supporting group bans (although they do not need to also be using the group ban viewer in order to be banned). Also, even when someone is banned from your group, they could successfully rejoin it from any simulator / region which does not have the server-side code deployed to it (leading to further confusion as they’ll appear in both your group members list and your group ban list).
Obviously, these issues will go away once the server-side code is fully deployed across the main grid. However, until such time as that has been achieved, people should be aware they may encounter what appear to be “issues” with the functionality simply because it isn’t available right across the grid.
More information will be posted on this when the project viewer surfaces and the code has been made available of a server-side RC.
Filed under: 2014 Project Updates Tagged: Group Ban List, Server Releases 
