The Alphaville Herald

Downed Sim Floodwaters Threaten Church – LL Clueless

by Pixeleen Mistral on 08/11/06 at 12:45 am

An hour of prayer to Live Help is finally answered

by Pixeleen Mistral, National Affairs desk

residents protest shoddy sim monitoring by LL

I was out dancing with a friend at a blues club about 30 minutes ago when the mojo wire sputtered to life, and one of the interns paged me. There was an uber-urgent dispatch from Sterling Whitcroft – it seems that a sim was down for over an hour and the rising void waters were threatening a church in an adjacent sim – a crowd of protesters were hoping to get the Linden’s attention but could not rez sandbags, so they resorted to a picket line. Once I finally did make it to ProvinceTown, the protesters were gone – but so was ProvinceTown West, so I can confirm that at least when I visited, the void waters were 6 feet high and rising. The protestors ask why the Lindens do not notice when sims crash and why it takes an hour to get a responce.

[more pictures and mojo wire alert after the jump]

sim is still down when Herald reporter hits the scene

Here is the dispatch from Sterling Whitcroft via mojo wire:
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–November 7, 2006

SL Citizens staged an impromptu protest march in ProvinceTown this evening to draw attention to the instabilities in the grid. A crowd numbering in the 9′s gathered outside The Olde Church on the edge of what was ProvinceTown West and its beloved Boots Nude Beach only to find that it had been inundated.

Standing in the shadows of the church, the gathering crowd broke into spontaneous prayer that the water would not rise further, as the gorgeous Linden sun set into the west — and the Linden’s really do rez a great sunset, don’t they?

ProvinceTown West SIM was gone — drowned in a flood of oceanwater. Although opinions differed as to the cause with some declaring it to be perhaps from global warming, others pointed to the US elections and suggested the drowning of the SIM was just more dirty tricks from Republican political operatives in an attempt to keep democratic avatars from the polls.

While the map continued to show the sim was still in existence, attempts to reach it were futile. A few brave citizens attempted to walk on the water to reach the missing sim, but were unable to get more than a few feet into their old neighborhood.

house of worship threatened by floodwaters from crashed sim

After an hour of prayer, a Linden answered the Live Help hotline phone. When informed of the high water, he first suggested that citizens roll up their pants cuffs. When pressed further, he revealed that the Lindens were not aware that the sim was down, and then relented and agreed to restart the sim.

Which brings me to wonder, “SL runs on ‘how many servers?’, and ‘routers’ and ‘networks’?” And they do not seem to have a ‘control system’ that will allow the Linden operations staff to know when a server has been under water/down/offline/kaput for over an hour?!? Perhaps some ‘control infrastructure’ to go with the new servers would be a good investment. As the grid grows in size to support all the new free accounts, the system management issues will just grow
- Sterling Whitcroft

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