San Francisco Earthquake

I spend a good portion of my days scouring news sites. Lately, there has been a substantial increase in the amount of reports predicting a large earthquake on the west coast and especially for San Francisco. If a big one hits, the chances of our favorite blossoming metaverse disappearing is great. Does anyone else realize this risk? How protected are LL servers from a risk such as a large earthquake?

DNA

Yes, I think at some point LL needs to come to terms with the ability to do personal backups of creator items.

If LL goes down in an earthquake though, it will be so long before they are up again, and the data loss will be so great, some other company will step in the gap before they can get back on track like as not. Let's face it, unless they have some realy big elaborate plan already worked out, an earthquake at LL spells the end of Second Life, personal backups or no.

If that happens we will likely end up as "digital refugees," old timers in a completely different game who still remember the dawn of the virtual worlds when a company called LL was king.

First of all, given the media fondness - perhaps even necessity - for fearmongering, combined with their historical accuracy in science reporting, added to the fact that predictive seismology is (self-admittedly) still just about one level above reading goat entrails, that the reports of which you speak have less validity than the 7 day weather outlook.

That said, does any one know of a good MOO/MUD? This could be *our* contingency plan. The Internet was designed foremost to be highly resilient in the face of major outages and on the whole has demonstrated itself to be so over the last 30 years.

I also officially designate SLUniverse.com to be our official point of virtual rendezvous in the event of West Coast disaster.

I was thinking the same thing, they need to have like a backup thingy on some other "safe" state... its always good to be safe then sorry!

I'm going to pray they begin implementing a monthly offsite mirroring of the asset server. It's one thing to be down for two months while the insurance pays for the restoration of your server farm. It's quite another to be down with all of assets that make SL what it is vanishing forever. At that point, who cares when SL comes back up?

Me too.

Which, given my *personal* beliefs about the existence of <deity>, will likely have the the same effect.

Heh. My personal thought on the matter, in fact, is that the Lord has better shit to do than prevent the loss of my data (as he has demonstrated in the past -- no hard feelings, Big Guy ).

So, we'll have to leave it up to LL.

I read in some article somewhere that the servers are in some old fort on huge rubber "shocks".

Or did I imagine that?

SL's Colo is apparently earthquake proof, mounted on large ball bearings, or something like that.

-Adam

Cryosphere.org - but I'm biased as I used to be an immortal...

I would be more upset at losing any of the Lindens!

365 Main -

This place used to be a tank construction facility, and its foundations go down to bedrock.

It has ball-joint stabilizers on the column that are the size and rating designed for the San Francisco airport buildings. If there were to be an earthquake directly under the building, everything around the building would move, sidewalks around it break away, and the building would remain at its relative location.

It has a ridiculous set of cooling units and power generators. I remember hearing that the power generators are designed to start up and be generating full power in 2 seconds.

Yeah.

Should there be a disaster, likely, the building would survive, and Lindens could continue to monitor the network remotely.

I saw the co-lo facility last July. It was pretty dang impressive.

LambdaMOO

This inspired in me an even worse thought! What if an airplane crashed into my house and demolished it with me in it? Then I could no longer play SL! In fact, I'd be dead! oh dear now I'll have nightmares.

coco

I am a LAN engineer for a large healthcare provider in the Detroit area.

Any new mission-critical system I implement must be accomponied by a disaster recovery plan and successful test. Those plans typically involve region-level redundancy and a step-by-step recovery process that can be followed by even the most green of engineers in case the people in-the-know end up dead.

About the worst natural disaster that Detroit is succeptable to is temperature related - nowhere near the risk in other areas of the country. If it is important enough for us in Detroit to be concerned about disaster recovery for mission-critical systems, Linden Labs in San Francisco should be too.

Unless of course, they don't consider the grid to be mission-critical

Given how many people's missions involve sexballs, I have to wonder.

It made me giggle reading this thread. I'm glad we have our priorities straight.

"Huge earthquake hitting Cali you say?! Thousands will die you say?! But will my SL be ok?!"

It makes me giggle when people read a thread without actually reading.

The original poster said "Does anyone else realize this risk? How protected are LL servers from a risk such as a large earthquake?" To which the answer is "not really at all (at least not that has ever been claimed or documented)".

There are plenty of disasters *such* as a large earthquake which would obliterate innumerable hours of player content development, including but not limited to: loss of 365 main due to fire, loss of asset server due to operator error, faulty programming, unlucky coincidence of simple hardware failure, malicious destruction of server facility, EMP blast near SanFran, disgruntled server facility staff with a shotgun and hostility toward RAID farms, etc. None of these require any people dying.

To put this in historical context. Linden Lab has already suffered limited asset loss due to "coincidental" drive failure and lost more than tens of thousands of forum posts due to a "whoopsie" by a forum admin. Neither of these losses involved a so much as a broken fingernail but were utterly unrecoverable as there were no backups at all.

To all of the declarations here that "the server facility is quite hoopy" miss the essential point that there is and always has been a very real risk that loss will occur because there are no farking backups. To which LL would likely reply "but we have sooo much data" or "we're just a little bitty company" which have been more-or-less the excuses for past losses.

Point of the matter is their lack of backup is so farking amateur that it blows the mind of anyone who ever had the responsibility for ensuring the preservation of any coroporate data. Worse still, this isn't corporate data but "player data" upon which LL's vWorld and thier corporate business plan is founded. In short, a bad keystroke could knock LL and SL out of existence. That's the truly "funny" bit.

Wells Fargo would laugh their corporate ass off, their IT folks would wet their pants in disbelief, and their lawyers would likely soil their suits if they had any idea of what a house of cards their new "business" "partner" lives in. Good thing for WF that they are using SL as a mere advertising toy ("you know, for kids!" instead of actual business as the FDIC would shut them down in an eyeblink otherwise.

LL is probably paying their colo facility to back up their data on DLTs or something like that. It's a common feature of even the cheapest colo packages. They may have decided not to restore the lost forum posts simply because they didn't want to pay to retrieve the tapes and do a restore on the forum DB. The few asset server fuckups usually occurred over periods like half an hour, so restoring from tapes wouldn't have really worked unless they got a full backup of the grid within that time (which is highly improbable, if they were using any kind of tape system.) Backups are usually done on a daily or weekly basis.

So do you actually know something or is this just wishful thinking?

But if you were logged into SL at the time, would your avatar survive? What if you were stuck in SL and couldn't log out because your house and contents (including your PC) had been distroyed? Forever a ghoast wandering the WA... (untill they finally fix the ghoasting problem )