http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/09/lxlabs_funder_death/

“The boss of Indian software firm LxLabs was found dead in a suspected suicide on Monday.

Reports of the death of K T Ligesh, 32, come in the wake of the exploitation of a critical vulnerability in HyperVM, a virtualization application made by LXLabs, to wipe out data on 100,000 sites hosted by the UK web hosting firm VAserv.”

Thanks for the mention. The HyperVM hack took down over 100,000 websites — and just over 100 OpenSim regions — so it seems pretty clear that the OpenSim regions were just collateral damage, hosted on the affected servers. Unless it was a really malicious hacker who specifically wanted to destroy a few homesteads, office buildings and an up-and-coming convention center.

And covered it up by taking down all the other stuff as well.

However, most OpenSim regions stayed up. OSGrid alone has over 2,000 regions. ReactionGrid is fully up. All the home-based regions were unaffected, of course, since they don’t use the virtualization software that was hacked. And many regions had full off-line backups, such as Simon Gutteridge’s regions on PioneerX, and will be fully recovered as soon as the servers are back up.

I love the degree of control OpenSim (and similar grid servers) offer their operators. You can host at home, on a cheap shared server, on an expensive, high-end server, or on the Amazon cloud, if you wanted to. A friend of mine is talking about setting up an OpenSim-based conference center using Sim-OnDemand’s Amazon Cloud hosting service. That’s less than $10 for 10 hours of use… get the region all set up, then activate it when you need it, shut it down when you don’t. I’ll be interested in trying it out if the project gets going — and I’m sure there will be several like it pretty soon.

- Maria, Hypergrid Business

Joel

The Treet.TV cameras and several key avatars on-set were experiencing repeated disconnects or crashes, to the point where we could not keep a solid enough video feed nor keep the guest inworld to consistently run the show.

There was something quite wrong with the region that several restarts did not resolve, including a problem that would generate an error any time any avatar would try to rez any attachment (and the attachment would fail to load). Collectively, the number of issues, and the distributed nature of the problems, got to be enough that we opted to cancel and attempt to reschedule the show.

At this point, through time inworld and with Concierge, I believe that we have the region back to a reasonable operating profile, and hope that for next week’s show we’re back to smooth operation.

Now that the region has had a thorough smackdown, it’s actually running more smoothly than we’ve ever seen it – including during the period when we were putting the new studio build together. I’m thinking at the moment that there was something wrong with it over the long term that was slowly degrading, and that hopefully now we’ll be back in a good position for next week’s show.

Thank you all for your support!

Joel Savard

always seems like important meetings and demos using computers and then the web haven’t worked on schedule in 20 years:)

Just another episode of the holodeck breaking? or is there something deeper not being learned after 20 years.

more real than real? hopefully not.

glad my os sim is on reactiogrid.:) keep it running Kyle:)

Yes, Skype and TalkShoe or some other service like that are good backups.

Re: OpenSim, we would never know this had happened to this overhyped HypeGrid if you hadn’t reported it. Thanks! And all the scrambling to justify it from Tateru doesn’t cut it — it’s an awful collapse, of the kind that SL hasn’t seen since 2004 when the Lindens actually decided to monetarily compensate people in Linden dollars for 2 days of no service.

And…we don’t know that in fact it wasn’t the target. Why assume that?

I had the worst attack of inventory loss I’ve ever had in SL this week. I had my boards and posters and rezzers set up to go put in the installation at the LandExpo when whoops, half my inventory disappeared. This happens all the time, my inventory fluctuates daily from 20,000 to 24,000 items, and I even keep items stashed inworld like a squirrel, but this was now down to 12,000, and losing precisely ever single thing I had accessed in the last 48 hours.

I tried everything to flush it all back, even trying a new trick which involves logging on to aditi and then to agni a few times, which forced in some of it, but a lot of my house rezzers are still gone, which amounts to hundreds of US dollars.

Having to hastily make a kind of scrappy display at LandExpo after that, I felt pretty hosed. Walking around the Expo like a fly crawling in molasses, with the sims being reset by Lindens and people bitching in the group, I gave up.

And I, too, realized that I never try to “work in SL” or “on a schedule”. I’ve made my small business there completely adaptable with all kinds of redundancies, workarounds, tactics, feints, etc. to try to deal with the never ending chain of bad mojo — builds lost from sims inexplicably, rental boxes resetting their times on sim restarts, scripts being turned into mush by some new patch, etc. etc. I keep four different kinds of rental boxes going, I have land spread all over on 60 sims so if one is done, I can send a customer to another, etc. etc.

And all of this is sort of “dysfunctional” because when I have to try to do something like “I would in real life,” i.e. make a plan, make a chart, perform it on schedule, it turns into hash.

I really have a new respect for people like you or Fleep Tuque or others who try to “work like we do in real life” with what we call “plans” and “schedules”.