Welcome to our March 2018 community meeting.
I’m not going to take up too much time as Balpien and Tenbears have a lot of tell you about the grid.
Every Tuesday night (DG time) senior management meet to discuss the grid and make decisions.
Typically our meetings take 3 hours and this hands on approach is being reflected in the stability of the grid.
In Discovery Grid we don’t measure success of the grid by how many regions are currently on the grid but by the community within the grid.
State of the Grid address
I’ll begin by showing you two charts. One is the Monthly Active User Count and the other is the region land mass for Discovery Grid. The charts show the metrics from October 2016 to the present. Overall the active user count has increase 15% per year, so that’s good. The region land mass has also increased steadily although in January of this year, we eliminated a bunch of ocean regions that were simply not required. This opened up more room in the servers for additional full regions to give DG growth headroom.
Because DG is self-hosted and since OpenSim does not provide any management tools, we have had to develop our own management system. You can see most of it in the new WEB site. Behind the scenes, there are processes to back up the grid databases and keep a rolling set for about 6 weeks. Backups happen 4 times a week. Region creation, renaming, moving and restarts are now automated by way of the WEB site. What took days can now be accomplished in minutes.
Quite some time ago, DG went with v0.9.0 because if offered many improvements, notably that many SL scripted items work with v0.9.0 and barely worked if at all with the older v0.8.3. But, there were a number of bugs with that release, many of them fixed in v0.9.1. Consequently, DG upgraded all of its regions to v0.9.1 on March 13th.
Along with the upgrade, other parts of the system were tuned for better performance, notably the MySQL database manager. The changes significantly improve performance and stability. We still have one more item to address.
People have reported problems hypergridding to Discovery Grid. The confusion is that the hypergrid address for Discovery Grid has been reported incorrectly in a few other helper WEB sites. Hypergridbusiness.com has fixed their listing. Both the login URI and the Hypergrid URI for Discovery Grid is the same. It is http://discoverygrid.net:8002, please make a note of it. This URI is listed in the DG WEB site. Also, your viewer might need to have its grid settings refreshed, the DG WEB site (at https://discoverygrid.net) gives the instructions on how to refresh the viewer grid settings.
Firestorm 5.0.11 works now
One very nice consequence of upgrading from v0.9.0 to v0.9.1 is that the latest version of Firestorm, v5.0.11, finally renders all mesh objects correctly. This was a problem with v0.9.0 which used to limit us to use Firestorm 5.0.7 – no longer.
On the southwestern corner of Discovery City, we have set up a test set of mesh objects that used to not render properly on 5.0.11. Do note thought to clear your viewer caches first because once something is viewed incorrectly that error is cached.
Grid Server Upgrade to 0.9.1 – happening 31st March
Although the regions were upgraded to v0.9.1, Robust (the grid server) upgrade was deferred. This had to be held off because the upgrade of Robust requires that the entire grid is taken down. Furthermore, the upgrade process will take several hours, so this task was deferred until the end of the month when all regions are taken down to get their performance maximized. This will take place March 31st starting at 9PM PDT.
HyperGrid Access
I have noticed that the current Robust has a huge memory leak that causes it to crash about once every 9-10 days (it is restarted automatically by the grid monitors). Robust starts at 2GB of memory but by 9 days it is up to 45GB or memory. Along with a few fixes in v0.9.1 I hope the memory leak problem will have been fixed.
EU GDPR - how it affects the grid
Big changes are happening May 25th. This is when the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) takes effect. There are specific areas that any company which services EU citizens must comply with else face severe fines. This applies to all companies large and small, so Discovery Grid and all OpenSim grids are affected. The basic requirements are about handling and protecting a person’s personal data, maintaining a system that shows reasonable protection processes (this includes the hosting services doing the same), strict reporting requirements if/when a service breach happens, and the right to be forgotten.
The details are discussed here: https://www.eugdpr.org/.
Discovery Grid servers are hosted by Soyoustart, a subsidiary of OVH (an EU company), so they will be fully compliant with the GDPR. In addition, the server software running DG’s OpenSim software has security updates automated, firewalls are in place, and access to critical components are locked to specific servers. None of these critical services are outward facing. With respect to these practices, DG is compliant with GDPR requirements.
Discovery Grid holds very little personal data (as defined by the regulation). DG must have a person’s valid email address, which is how we report problems to avatar account holders. For billing purpose, which is basically region tier, DG must have the email address, actual street address and city.
For money, DG uses the services of either PODEX or Gloebit to handle buy/sell of those currencies. We expect these companies to provide us with written assurances that their processes are GDPR compliant. If either company cannot provide such assurances, we will notify you of this issue and recommend you not use their services.
As for the right to be forgotten, DG is implementing a “Forget me” task on the WEB site. When a person requests to be forgotten, their avatar is deleted. Their entire inventory is discarded, the avatar is removed from all groups, any groups they owned are deleted (and members ejected). Any regions they owned are deleted, contents returned to respective owners. Assets sold/shared with others are retained but the creator name is anonymized. This process is permanent and cannot be undone.
Email – confirming and accessibility
Because DG must be able to contact all people affected by a possible breach, the email address provided by a person when they create an account or when they change their email address later on, absolutely must be valid. It is the case today that creating an account, using the lost password task, or changing one’s email will always require a response from a confirmation email. Additionally, DG will send a confirmation request by email to all avatar accounts once every three months. If a response is not received, the account is suspended until the matter is resolved. This is both for your protection and DG’s protection. The requirements of the EU GDPR are reasonable in the sense that they are meant to protect individuals’ personal data, but the fines can be extreme, so it is necessary DG takes the steps to reduce its risk.
Diva wifi is going away
Diva wifi, which is a standard WEB portal for OpenSim has a lot of bugs, does not look nice, and it does not comply with the EU GDPR requirements. Now that the new WEB is ready, Diva wifi will be removed from the system. Access to the WEB site is https://discoverygrid.net. You can create an account, login, check on your offline IMs, get money transactions either DC or Gloebits, update settings, and more.
Region health monitor on every region
We have been adding region health and traffic monitors on DG owned regions, and now we are making this device available to everyone who owns a region. Click on the “Get Region Health Monitor” pane next to me for a copy. Remember, there can only be one of these per region. If you rez more than one, you will hear a siren sound warning you of a duplicate.
Gloetbit Mall on Discovery Grid
The issues we had seen initially with vendor scripts has been resolved
It is our information from Chris Colosi, the owner of Gloebit Currency, multiple profits with other avatars is not possible at this time.
So, if you do not own a region there is a profit margin that must be met between you and Discovery Grid. Contact Angel or Jay Copperfied if you have any questions
The Discovery Grid, Gloebit Island is a grid sponsored region, giving our merchants the opportunity to sell their products to the HyperGrid, and obviously, to residents on our grid, that have a Gloebit account.
Shops are available, currently, contact Jay Copperfield if you may be interested in a shop area of your own.
Event Calendar:
On the front page of the Discovery Grid web site, A Google Calendar displays events and happenings. Contact Angel, Jay or Tenbears if you would like to have your event noted in the calendar on the front page.
https://discoverygrid.net/index.php
Events:
We would like to see our residents establish events on their own regions. If you know or would like to bring in DJs to entertain your friends or the entire grid, we will be happy to advertise that information on the grid FaceBook pages and or, the calendar. Let one of the admins and or Angel know what you might have in mind and what schedule works best for you.
April 18th, the Safari Tour group will be here on the Discovery Grid.
We would love to see as many residents on the grid as possible. The group of approx. 20 people will be here to explore the grid and enjoy some of our features. If you would like to have your region or regions on a notecard we will provide each guest, contact Tenbears as soon as possible with a very brief description of your region a landmark as well as a picture if your region if you wish.
https://hgsafari.blogspot.com.au/
MrMikie String
will be back to Marina del Rey the second Saturday of each month. His event earlier this month was very well received and very well enjoyed by those residents and residents from the HyperGrid as well. April 21st is Mikes next appearance, the third weekend of the month this time around, due to a previous scheduled engagement .
Discovery Village
[13:53] Bastien Falconvale: Okay... so Discovery Village is ready to go.
[13:53] Jay Copperfield: Maybe want to rename it, Balpien :)
[13:54] Lindee Ellsmere: Awesome Bastien!
[13:54] Bastien Falconvale: Houses are in and furnished. LMs are on the =rental board= in the lodge.
[13:54] Kayaker Magic: What is Discovery Village?
[13:54] Bastien Falconvale: If any of you talented shop owners would like to contribute furniture or knick knacks please let me know. And yes, Angel... I'll pass out the LMs to everyone.
[13:55] Lindee Ellsmere: Let me know what you need and it's yours
[13:55] Bastien Falconvale: Kayaker it's the free housing for new residents. FREE for 30 days.
[13:55] Bastien Falconvale: Passing out LMs to the Village now. Discovery Village.
[13:55] Bridget Jennings: ty
[13:56] Jay Copperfield: TY :)
[13:56] Grid: Bastien Falconvale gave you The Village.
[13:56] lunastra silverweb: very nice thanks
[13:56] Balpien Hammerer: It's a lovely place.
[13:56] Aliah Dufaux: Thank you
[13:56] Tuscan Lectar: *raising Hand* Ah.. Angel in regards to rental fees for Vendors can you IM me said cost. I have a few Vendors I been talking ot to come over here and that woudl help for my final pitch . *grin*
[13:56] Bastien Falconvale: That should be everyone. Did I miss anyone?
[13:56] Jay Copperfield: It is beautifully done.
[13:57] Bastien Falconvale: I built some of the houses there. Ten built a couple and also has put boats there for our new residents to enjoy.
[13:57] Bridget Jennings: nice
[13:57] talia rosher: thank you Bastien!
[13:57] Bastien Falconvale: Balpien put a hang glider there for the, and I have some of Kayaker's horses there for them to ride.
[13:57] talia rosher: really nice
[13:57] Bastien Falconvale: So they can get an idea of what we have to offer here.
[13:57] Lindee Ellsmere: Oh wow!
[13:57] Lindee Ellsmere: Sounds awesome
[13:58] Bastien Falconvale: The goal was to make it quite different from any other free housing for new residents and I believe we've achieved that.
