[Opensim-users] Safe use of OpenSim - was "Fw: Re: [SLED] Linden Lab Sells Second Life!"

Fri Apr 3 19:45:03 UTC 2009

Actually, had I been informed of a fix (rev or patch) to that bug, I (or you, or we) could have put it into 0.6.3-post-fixes and poked people to 'update' that branch. Would probably had gone some way.

In tortoise, It's really simple to merge a certain revision to another wc. Right-click on trunk, choose log, locate the rev, right click on the rev, choose 'merge revision to...' and locate the post-fixes wc (you need them both checked out) and press 'ok'. It will merge the rev into the post-fixes, taking the history of both branches into account when auto-merging.

You might experience conflicts, but in a surprising number of cases you wont.

Best regards,
Stefan Andersson
Tribal Media AB

From: adam at deepthink.com.au
To: opensim-users at lists.berlios.de
Date: Wed, 1 Apr 2009 21:36:11 -0400
Subject: Re: [Opensim-users] Safe use of OpenSim - was "Fw: Re: [SLED] Linden Lab Sells Second Life!"

My advice would be run both.

We don’t up the protocol version too often – so there’s nothing stopping you from running a handful of regions at trunk, and the remainder on stable. If you have customers involved, while we appreciate the feedback – I would probably say stick with stable there. 

For your own testing purposes, running trunk isn’t a bad option – and it also gives you the flexibility that if something is broken majorly, you still have all your stable regions.

To be fair, the 0.6.3 release was not fantastic – the avatar bug should have probably been fixed before that was tagged. I think in future that complaint has registered pretty soundly and releases might be more thoroughly tested through release candidates.

Adam

From: opensim-users-bounces at lists.berlios.de [mailto:opensim-users-bounces at lists.berlios.de] On Behalf Of John Sheridan
Sent: Wednesday, 1 April 2009 6:32 PM
To: opensim-users at lists.berlios.de
Subject: Re: [Opensim-users] Safe use of OpenSim - was "Fw: Re: [SLED] Linden Lab Sells Second Life!"

Holy blog wars Batman!  I can see emotions are running high, so I thread lightly while writing this...  

For around six months now since I and my cohorts started building out our grid we've been more or less running off of the trunk.  We have a weekly update process wherein every Sunday after the commit emails stop flying by I'll shut down, back up, then update everything to that Sunday's SVN.  After the update is complete I'll go around in world, try a few tests to make sure that everything is in one piece and that basic functionality is there.  So far there have only been a handful of times that I've had to cancel or roll back an update due to broken functionality or warnings on the mailing lists that heavy changes were taking place. 

As far as data and content are concerned, we all realize that this is alpha software and that certain instabilities may exist from week to week.  So far we've not had any major disasters as far as data and content save a few mangled, non-persisting, or overly persisting (where they won't go away) prims.  However in most cases workarounds were available and all users were told how to go about utilizing them.  As an added measure, just in case we rely on the weekly backups as well periodic dumps of our sims into OAR files.  

My primary reason for choosing this sort of procedure is so that while we are building, creating, and using the grid we can also contribute back to OpenSim in the form of bug reports and feedback.  (See a draft copy of our community standards for more on this:  http://www.pseudospace.net/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=56&Itemid=60)

Regardless, we do consider our setup to be in quasi-production regardless of whatever minor glitches exist within the trunk.  As well, we are sure to make it quite clear to the few users that we do have (albeit not many as we do not yet have any completed or usable environments other then Ellis) that both OpenSim as the underlying software and Pseudospace as the service itself are under heavy development and could be unstable at times.  

Now as a software developer myself (albeit in a completely different realm then OpenSim as I do small scale database / windows apps) I can understand the risks of running untested software for production uses, however in this case I'm unsure as how to proceed.  We like contributing back to the community in whatever way we can, and also enjoy testing or riding the bleeding edge of the wave, yet after reading the prior posts I'm suddenly not sure if simply backing up, exporting, and rolling back is as safe as I thought.  From the standpoint of those who develop OpenSim, would you guys say what I'm doing is safe?

Thanks and good karma to you all,

 - John Sheridan / Orion Pseudo

Frisby, Adam wrote: Honestly, I think there's some disconnects between people here that need to be addressed. There are several different audiences here, and consequently several different reactions. There is the group of users attempting to put OpenSim into production environments - the harsher reactions I have seen tend to fall into this group. There is home users and hobbyists - the more positive reactions are from there. To the production users, we do as a team find it unfortunate you were badly impacted, however as a group a large portion of work on OpenSim comes from personal developers without sponsorship. As a team, we also make absolutely no guarantees about trunk releases at all (infact we often make the opposite), the best practices we publish on our website very clearly state that production users should stick to a tagged release, and even then you are operating alpha code. While we have generally been blessed with a reasonably well written and maintained codebase - trunk is not guaranteed to operate. Had there been an accident and the database became corrupted over time due to coding error - the outrage on this list would not have been as loud, however the impacts would have been significantly worsened. Often, developers need to break code and features in order to improve things, if we cannot make trunk unstable, then the ability to develop and continually improve the codebase is restricted. One recent example was some avatar appearance issues that showed up after the MXP stack - that one I caused by removing code which erroneously assumed an avatar utilized the LLUDP Stack. The short term result of that change was it broke avatar appearance in certain circumstances for a period of about 24 hours, the long term result was we got one step closer to more protocols, more neutrality and abstracted behaviour - all seen as good things to the codebase -- however another example of why we do not recommend anyone utilize trunk for production - it was still broken for a day, and this is a regular occurance. For instance, a patch not too long ago adjusted the asset database format - while fine on local systems with small asset counts, in a production environment (specifically osgrid), it caused the entire database to melt. OSGrid accepts that risk since they are a testing grid - but to another operator, you would have applied that same patch just as easily as osgrid did if today's example is the norm. Now the first response, I expect will be 'this was deliberate/vandalism' - yes there was an april fools joke in the codebase. However, please consider the following: * The impact was for the most part completely negligible - no permanent changes were made, the code deactivates automatically, a patch is available on mantis (and is no longer in trunk anyway).* You are running a version of the codebase that is *explicitly marked as 'not suitable for production'*.* You are receiving a product for free under an extremely liberal license on behalf of the generosity of others. That april fools joke was /only ever accessible in the developers and testers oriented release/. The intended audience was those two groups - developers and testers. Even the release candidate version had the offending code removed. If you want to put OpenSim into production, fantastic - we like to see it being used. However when you then do not follow the advice we post clearly on the website in multiple places and put trunk into production, then no - the responsibility for failure rests upon your shoulders - trunk is /not safe for production/. We do recognize the growing corporate demand for OpenSim - it's one of the reason that people such as Stefan have begun a back-patches version (post-fixes) which incorporates fixes into the last stable version. We spend the time maintaining that version because we recognise the need, it's also the reason we have been as a group moving towards more release-oriented packaging such as the installers and other easy-to-deploy packages. If you are a corporate user putting OpenSim into production, make sure you have the following preparations: 1. Have a stable revision handy - currently that is 0.6.3-postfixes. Sometimes bugs show up randomly and break things badly. You should always have a backup system when working with OpenSim. 2. Use our postfix releases normally - sometimes a feature patch is very tempting to upgrade to, but then ask yourself what the cost might be? If stick figure avatars are going to cause you to have issues with clients - ask yourself what random object destruction might cause. It's happened in the past on trunk - I have no doubts major unintended bugs will sneak into trunk in future. Only upgrade past post-fixes if you keep a very keen eye on SVN commit logs and are capable of testing hardened revisions. 3. Keep backups. Too many OpenSim installs do not do this. OAR works well for content, however a full database backup is recommend (this varies from tool to tool, know your system.) 4. Slow and steady is the name of the game. We actually keep several of our clients on a r6XXX release since we're able to confirm it works for their uses in the majority of cases and doesn't have unknown factors. Regards, Adam    
-----Original Message-----From: opensim-users-bounces at lists.berlios.de [mailto:opensim-users-bounces at lists.berlios.de] On Behalf Of Teravus OvaresSent: Wednesday, 1 April 2009 2:57 PMTo: opensim-users at lists.berlios.deCc: jonathangreenlee at yahoo.comSubject: Re: [Opensim-users] Fw: Re: [SLED] Linden Lab Sells SecondLife! One more reply to this.   Have a look at some positive responses. http://osgrid.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=1051&start=10 Sincrerely Teravus On 4/1/09, Teravus Ovares <teravus at gmail.com> wrote:    
Now now, lets be reasonable.     It's one thing to get April fooled.. it's another to gloat about it.  Generally, I don't think it's a      good    
idea to gloat.   It is what it is ..    and we learn and continue on. Sincerely Teravus  On 4/1/09, Skidz Tweak <skidz.tweak at gmail.com> wrote:      
Don't let the door hit you in the butt!Everyone bitching about this only has theirselves to blame!If you can't live with that fact, keep making up crap in your head        saying it    

was someone else fault. That's it... the sweet feel of denial. -----Original Message-----From: opensim-users-bounces at lists.berlios.de[mailto:opensim-users-bounces at lists.berlios.de] On Behalf Of        Jonathan    

GreenleeSent: Wednesday, April 01, 2009 4:07 PMTo: opensim-users at lists.berlios.deSubject: Re: [Opensim-users] Fw: Re: [SLED] Linden Lab Sells Second        Life!    

 I want to make sure you understand why my company is now        withdrawing our    

good will and support toward OpenSim,And why we are withdrawing our financial support from several        OpenSim Grids    

we were supporting with our business. --- On Wed, 4/1/09, MW <michaelwri22 at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:         
From: MW <michaelwri22 at yahoo.co.uk>Subject: Re: [Opensim-users] Fw: Re: [SLED] Linden Lab Sells          Second Life!    

To: opensim-users at lists.berlios.deDate: Wednesday, April 1, 2009, 4:03 PMWhileTeravus did the april 1st joke, all of core (or certainlymost of it) knew about it. And we fully supported himapplying it. As he said it was never in a tagged version. --- On Wed, 1/4/09, Teravus Ovares<teravus at gmail.com> wrote:From: Teravus Ovares<teravus at gmail.com>Subject: Re: [Opensim-users] Fw: Re: [SLED] Linden LabSells Second Life!To: jonathangreenlee at yahoo.com,opensim-users at lists.berlios.deDate: Wednesday, 1 April, 2009, 9:59 PM FYI, the avatar stick bug April 1 joke was my idea. Also, I think it's really important to note that all ofthe developersof OpenSimulator have, since day one told people to avoidSVN forsomething that is production.   That includes anything that you wantto work. April 1st is a tradition in OpenSimulator and on April 1sta sense ofhumor is required when using SVN.   We made sure that allreleases andtags did *not* have the April fool's joke in it forthis very reason.   We make releases and tag revisions not for our benefit,but foryours. I know some people on this list don't spend time onIRC, however, it'sbeen hinted upon since February that there would likely bean Aprilfool's joke there.  For those that argue that mostpeople don't sit inIRC, see two paragraphs up. Now, if despite our warnings and hints, you continued touse SVN, thenlikely your avatar were stick-bugged. I reiterate what has been said all along.   Direct SVNrevisions arerisky.  They've always been, and it's always badpractice to use themunless you've thoroughly looked them over.   A lot ofpeople thoughtit was funny.  The people who did not were in the far minority.  Sincerely Teravus  On 4/1/09, Jonathan Greenlee<jonathangreenlee at yahoo.com> wrote:          
 This was funny.Vandalising everyone's avatar was not.             
On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 3:59 PM, S Collingwood              <collingwood.7 at osu.edu>          

wrote:This is really BIG.  A takeover!  We can expectpanzer tanks rolling into shopping malls --              uniformed guards at simcrossings          

--  dogs and cats living together -- it's the              END!!          

Linden Lab Sells Second Life!              
                 http://www.secondlifeupdate.com/news-and-stuff/linden-lab-sells-        second-life/    

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