Server Releaes Beta : General Discussion

This thread is for general discussion of the server release beta process. Please do not discuss issues with specific server beta releases here; there will be individual threads for individual release versions.

Update 2008/10/24 : There is a blog post about the server release beta program at : http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/10/23/help-us-beta-test-second-life-server-releases/

There's no chance I can make your meetings, but with several hundred active estate residents I can definitely say someone (or many) with deep technical expertise and estate level access can make it.

44 active regions of various class, configuration and loading at your service.

I'll do a group announcement and you'll have the support you need, stat.

Edit: to be clear, I'm picking up my kids from school at that hour, not actively avoiding meetings.

Count Me in!

I will join the groups later today. I can not volunteer my entire estate, but I will sign up the "pilot roll" for a few regions (OS and full prim).

Anyone I should contact? or special ticket instructions?

Alisha

Please email me (prospero at lindenlab dot com) if you want to have your island or islands included in the pilot rolls. Bonus points if you include the names of all your islands.

Yep. 2PM and 3PM SLT are hard for anybody who works regular hours anywhere in the US to make.

I know there's no time slots that are perfect for everybody. Or even that are perfect for most-everybody. I'm just sayin'...

Dedicated attendees! We want a group of people who will come regularly to these office hours

Then you will need to have some office hours that people with regular jobs can attend. There are so many things I cannot attend or be a part of because I'm employed. And the employment is necessary for me to pay you the US dollars necessary to keep things running. It's annoying that being a good citizen in the real life makes me a second class citizen in the second life. Thus, I cannot offer any assistance with debugging the server code.

^
| Yeah, that.

In the Original Beta we were more then happy to help Linden Lab find and squash as many bugs as we could in the time we had, now you are asking for an Open Ended commitment from us? Will you be paying us? Will you be offering LifeTime Accts to those that attend regularly and jump through the PJIRA hoops?

So just exactly what are you offering? Are you going to LISTEN and COMMUNICATE with those that participate, or just do your usual brush off routine?

Will you treat these BETA testers better then you did your OPEN SOURCE developers? Many of whom have abandoned the project because Linden Lab Employee's openly trashed their coding. So, will you be any more "Professional" this time around, or act the same way?

I would be happy to Beta Test, seeing I did it the first time around, but, I would really like to get the answers to these questions, because if you plan on pulling your normal routine, I'm not interested in giving you any more of my time for free.



Bob

I'm sorry the office hours are not at a more convenient time. If you can't go to those office hours, please still participate. Starting with next week's office hours, we'll post transcripts of them. You can test scripts, objects, etc., on the Preview Grid, and then either discuss them with others online in the group, discuss them in the relevant thread of the forum, or post and/or comment on PJIRA issues.

If we want to test scripts that are already made and are in our inventory or are part of objects in our inventory, can we do that? If so, do we need to download a different viewer to do that (or just download the viewer if we are planning on writing new scritps)?

How "dedicated" do you expect us to be if we participate? Should we log into it every day, every few days, once a week?

When we log in is there anything (other than looking up the version) to indicate we're in the test grid and not the production grid? (Because I'm the idiot who would spend all my money thinking it's the test version and then find out it isn't.)

Will we able to build on group land in the test grid that belongs to our group in the production grid? Or will the group not exist? If we can't, are there places that we can build and leave things for a few days to see if they are still normal when we return?


And, no, I wouldn't be able to make it to those office hours either.

There will be group land where members of the "Second Life Beta" group can build.

When it comes to copying scripts over from agni -- we're working on doing a database refresh right now. Hopefully, if all goes well, that will be put in place next Tuesday. When that happens, your Preview Grid inventory will be synced to the inventory you have in the main Second Life environment as of sometime around the end of this week. If you want to copy scripts after that, the most straightforward way to do it is just to cut and paste the text into a file on your system, and then cut and paste the text from that file into the script editor on aditi....

The same viewer you use to connect to Second Life can be used to connect to the Preview Grid. See the link in the Second Life wiki from the blog post about beta testing that describes how to log in to the Preview Grid.

When you have logged into the beta grid, the bar at the top of your client window is a different color from what it is when you're in the main Second Life environment. In order to figure out if you're in a region using the version of the server that we're beta testing, see the aforementioned Preview Grid wiki page for information.

Re: how dedicated... as dedicated as you can be and want to be. It's nice to have a core group of people who learn the ins and outs of the system, and with whom we learn to work well. It's also nice to have a larger group of people who contribute a little bit here and there. We fully expect to have people contribute a wide range. If you just occasionally drop by to test out some scripts, that's great. We're not demanding huge commitments, but if you're interested in testing and making sure that your things don't interact strangely with new versions, of course we're happy if you want to spend more time at it. It's entirely up to you.

When you say Database refresh, does that mean that accounts that aren't old enough to be in the current database "snapshot" will have access to the beta grid after this?

Prospero, can you clarify something for me?

When you talk about volunteering an island or islands for the pilot rolls, does that mean that said region(s) would be getting beta software on the main grid?

Or does that mean that said region(s) would be set up on the beta grid?

I assumed the former, but then the talk about logging on to the beta grid makes me wonder if it's the latter. Either way I have sent you an email offering one of my regions for testings.

Cheers!

-Atashi

Funny isn't it. Someone asks serious questions and instead of offering some sort of reply, these people instead just remove the post.

I've said this in my Blog before, now I must cross-over and say it here. Nazism is alive and well at Linden Lab. Folks, censoring someone's questions, no matter how "truth cutting" they are, is no way to deal with the Community. It shows only that you are very small minded and unable to do your job at Linden Lab with any great effeciency.

I think it's time someone at Linden Lab step up and overthrow this idea that hard questions are mean questions. Why not be you Prospero? Perhaps that is too hard a task? If that's too difficult to master, then how is it that you can expect anyone to have any confidence in your work on the Beta Grid? I mean, if you choose only to reply to the warm fuzzy questions, then I think we found the underlying problem to Linden Lab. In order to make Second Life a BETTER place for all, hard questions need to be asked and answered. I thought perhaps you might have the confidence to do such, apparently my impressions of you in-world were wrong.

Say Hello to another wasted and futile time in Second Life. If I were anyone volunteering for this fiasco, I would strongly suggest you ask for some type of renumeration. I've been part of Beta's before, in the old days, our renumeration was to see these bugs squashed, now it seems all Linden Lab employee's want to do is fix the soft problems, not the hard problems, which will lead to your frustration as you participate in this Beta Program; just ask a few of the OPEN SOURCE Developers who've since abandoned Linden Labs. You might ask for a Lifetime acct., if you plan on spending a lot of time in the Beta Grid, at least then you have something to work for, seeing that the only bugs going to be squashed here are the soft ones, at least you get something for your frustrations.

Prospero, I ask you, as an old friend, respond and answer the questions asked before, and presented here now. Otherwise show me you are nothing more then a mindless employee and just erase this message too. Your actions tell me who you are, what shall it be this time?

Re: voluteering estates: we need up to 3000 islands to volunteer for the pilot roll... at the moment, we're an order of magnitude or two below that. Unless we fill it, we'll continue to fill the rest of the pilot roll with randomly chosen estates.

Meanwhile, we can copy a *few* regions over to the Preview grid.

As such, mostly what we're looking for is volunteers for the pilot roll. However, it is possible to import a small number of regions on to the Preview grid.

However, even if your own island isn't on the Preview grid, we still hope you'll log in there and test things-- items you use regularly, that sort of thing-- on the sandboxes there. I ran into a hitch yesterday trying to deploy 1.25.0 to the Preview grid (some of you may have noticed that it was down for a few hours), but hope to have 1.25.0 deployed there today if at all possible. The pilot roll will not happen before late next week (and may not happen until the week after, at this point).

Ovaltine : yes, the database refresh means that people who've registered Second Life accounts in the last three months will finally be able to log in to the Preview Grid.

Thanks for the info Prospero! Well, you have my email volunteering one of my regions (Tangiwai) for the pilot roll. While it would be 'cool' to have one of my regions on the beta grid, that won't stop me from going there to test stuff out. I just wasn't sure initially what I was volunteering for.

I didn't actually realize this thread was the continuation of a Blog entry at the time I had posted above -- the blog has been so dead for a while that I stopped looking at it. Just a suggestion, for the people who read the forums but don't check the blog, it would be handy to put a link to the blog in the first post of the thread

Cheers!

-Atashi

Thanks for showing everyone just what kind of Censoring Linden Lab employee you are.

I have one question, if I come test things in the Beta Grid, will you answer my questions or keep acting like nothing is being said?

Will you talk to me if I find a bug? Will you want me to report it? If you aren't going to answer my simplest questions, how can I trust that when I'm working for you, you will answer my questions then?

Quite a quandry you put me into there Prospero, just what am I supposed to do now? I want to help, but I don't want to be ignored. I guess that it was ridiculous for me to think you actually wanted help from us Old-Timers, we are all just throw aways to Linden Lab these days, even though we provided the "going Gold revenue" with our Lifetime acct purchases. Never mind that we came to Linden Lab's aid when asked to, now we are just not even recognized as people with a voice.

Make sure when you decide to "Volunteer" for Linden Lab you understand exactly what you are getting into friends. If you have a HARD bug, that Linden Lab can't fix, they'll just decide the problem was you, not a real bug, because as we know, there are NO BUGS in Second Life.

BTW Prospero, next time you want to talk about the Community, and my take on it, don't come calling. I've had it with you and your two-faced actions.

Somebody's grumpy today..

Soooo much hostility!!

While Prospero and the rest of our Censoring Linden Lab Corporation might think these are Hostile posts, quite honestly, these are HARD QUESTIONS that require real thought and real answers.

I can be quite hostile, yes, but I usual will save that for the Blog (http://insidesecondlife.blogspot.com). Here, I come on, ask real questions, albeit Hard, and expect answers. What did I receive instead? Censorship, because either Linden Lab are unable to handle Hard Questions or they no longer care to have the help of a group of people that once helped bring SL to market.

After two attempts at asking these questions, I must admit, most likely the latter is true, and that is sad in itself, but shouldn't Linden Lab just come out and say, "We don't want the help of the Old-Timers that might ask hard questions", instead of Censoring and offering no reason for it?

When you decide to Censor someone's posts, you should have the where-with-all to give the reason. When you don't, it shows you are not competent enough to be running this Forum (let alone a Beta Grid).

So, Prospero, perhaps you can share just what your reasons are for ignoring my "Hard Questions"? Of course, you can just delete this Post, and show again, that you follow the ridiculous rules set down by those above you and practice Censorship without giving reasons for such. There were a group of men in 1945 who used the excuse of "We were just following orders" too, see the comparison more clearly now?

No.. You're being very hostile and insulting. Almost to the point where I can see the specks of foam around your month from here.

I have deleted several posts from one poster, who keeps coming back and posting ever more offensive posts complaining about the deletion.

To be clear. I'm happy to answer (or, if necessary, try and fail to answer) hard questions. What I'm not happy with is people who post questions in an aggressive, attacking, and insulting manner. There is a difference between asking a hard question and stating a half-rhetorical question that implies that Linden Lab is a bunch of screwups who never do anything right. The former can lead to constructive conversation, the latter is a troll. Please, let's keep the conversation constructive.

I will offer my estate up for the pilot roll regions. Reading the blog post, I didn't see any information on how to inform LL of this. Is this post good enough?

Hi -- please email me (prospero at lindenlab dot com) if you want your regions added to the pilot roll

Prospero - will you be emailing anything back to us, like confirmation or something?

Just so we don't keep bugging you / so we know that we've been added to the list?

Thanks!

-Atashi