Downtime, is it always this bad?

Is downtime for Second Life usually this bad? I've only been playing for a few days so I don't know, have downtimes usually been this long? It was down this morning when I tried and the last update on the website says it'll be down until 4pm Pacific but it's 5pm Pacific and still no connection?

nope.

This downtime is longer than normal because apparently there was a hardware failure at LL. (As a support tech let me tell you.... that can seriously impact projected schedules.)

My personal opionion: This was a mistake in mid-level managment. Let's fix bad drives AND upgrade software during the same maintenance window. Never a good idea.

Wierdness.

SL actually seems "up" much more often than some other large scale games I've had experience with, I think.

Usually, all maintenance is done and over before most westcoasters finish their breakfast. Occasionaly harddisks break, someone spills coffee, or similar mishaps that can really make you feel down. Hence the term.

Sure, I can understand hardware failures, I've been in the IT field for 13 yrs or so. But not keeping your customers aprised to a situation as bad as this is just not good. A simple statement showing honest facts (Not made up excuses) as to what is going on would be very appreciated. I don't like being left in the dark.

Linden Labs needs to have someone put a note in there, some ideas:

--
"While attempting to apply our latest patch Bob accidentally did a DROP on the player inventory tables. I sent Joe out to the data archive company to retrieve the offsite tape backups but evidently the tapes had not arrived yet. He's waiting for the courier to arrive with the tape."

"While updating the servers with our latest patch our RAID array experienced two drive failures causing us to lose all data and require a complete restore, we're working on the issue."

"Mary forgot to pay the bill for our colocation site, we're working to get the matter straightened out soon.."
--

Put SOMETHING up, don't leave your customers in the dark! BE HONEST! Don't make up excuses because if the truth gets out it'll be very damaging.

Posted a few hours ago.../3/3b/6906/1.html

This is INSANE!

Murphy says (supposedly after long years in IT and household appliance market): "If something breaks, there's more to follow."

"Mary forgot to pay the bill for our colocation site, we're working to get the matter straightened out soon.."

LOL! still laughing at that.

Thats nice and more along the lines of what I would have liked to see at:

http://secondlife.com/status/

Since thats where the client points you and I'm sure that not everyone reads the forums. I know that when I played Star Wars online I seldom checked the forums they had.

Linden: Post the information in a single place, preferably on the status page, NOT in the forums only. A thread in the forums for people to discuss around is fine, but don't make people dig around to find the information when it can be copied to the "Official" status page.

SL has very little downtime. Usually when SL is down it takes about two hours, and it doesn't happen often. It's not a weekly event, at any rate.

No basically you can play SecondLife 24/7 any idea. The normal updates usually only takes a few hours or so and they are announced a few days before. Also they try to pick a time at which most of the players are asleep (well since I never sleep...)

This wasn't so bad, considering the circumstances. I can't see this being a 'management decision' that impacted the upgrade. You have a software rollout, you do it. You need to fix hardware, you do it. Seems that their server cluster is pretty robust, and I'm sure they don't rely on anything less than some RAID array system for storage. One thing you don't delay on when fixing an array is replacing the disk and rebuilding the set. It all makes sense. I think Linden Labs and their personnel are really in tune with what the members want, and they do their best to fufill that.

I can agree however about the status page - some want more detail, and I was among them. Small things like that make a difference.

For what it is worth, after SL came up, Gray was unavailable. One of the Linden team worked with me last night, so at least they are aware. I couldn't log in this morning, so for all I know that region is now up.

I salute the Linden Labs staff, and you will certainly see me as a subscriber after my trial ends. (Or nearly ends..heh.)

Regarding the requests for status details in this thread:

Generally, we post status and information updates to the Announcements forum. This is mostly because it allows folks to subscribe to it, and get email when we make a post there. Many of the residents take advantage of this feature.

The status page (on secondlife.com/status), is really just for current status, and it's really only referred to by the viewer; nothing else of ours links to it. I've added a link from the status page to the Announcements forum; hopefully that will help the information flow.

As for the level of detail; be careful what you ask for, else you might start getting posts of fsck logs.

Seriously, I try to post enough information that all of our residents can get a feel for what's going on without having their eyes glaze due to the technical details. From now on, I think I'll try seperating out the detail for those who like to know about this sort of thing; we'll see how that goes.

Wooooooo Mark! Talk dirty to me! Show me your inodes baby!

I've done that in the past without too much hassle for one company Iworked for.For Linden, it blew up in their faces this time. It is a risky thing to do.

As this is the first major downtime I've seen, I don't think it's that bad.