[Opensim-dev] Slots still being taken

[Mircea Filipescu]

It's been a while since on grids such as osgrid, people are taking the slots of simulators while they are down without having any idea about it. The reason is that when shutting down a simulator, it may appear (and be considered) empty on the main map. If you keep it down for too long, someone looking for a place to start their region in can see your slot being empty and register their own simulator there. When you start opensim.exe without having any suspicion afterward, you will suddenly see your sim being unable to register to the grid and when you open the map discover you either have to contact the person and tell them that slot is actually yours (if they even want to move it somewhere else) or move your sim yourself. Worst thing is that Opensim doesn't support leaving offline IM to someone yet, so unless you can find that person somewhere else you are in this discomforting situation.

I have kept a mantis about this for long but I seen no one updated it or commented on it. Its this one http://opensimulator.org/mantis/view.php?id=1740 . Opensim grids basically have no way a user can claim a slot as theirs, and anyone can run their own sim there while theirs is down and block them. I had my slot taken by mistake 3 or 4 times in the last four months, one situation while my sim even displayed as up and running from the console (probably crashed). My suggestion was giving users the ability to register a slot on the grid from the web interface (such as from osgrid.com) to the person's account, and only allow sims with that owner UUID (or a given simulator UUID) to run in that slot. Currently I'm in another situation where I'm waiting to contact someone who got my slot while my sim was down. I'm not sure how often this happens but I thought to bring this up again and suggest a method for users to register slots to their account.

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