Linden Lab have posted an update on their Grid Status Page that a week of scheduled maintenance on the grid is underway. The post, which I’ve altered slightly to reflect that the maintenance is taking place this week, reads :
Beginning Monday, November 17, we will be undertaking a full week of scheduled maintenance. This maintenance will take place at approximately 7:00 AM each day this week. Each region will be subject to one or more restarts, as its host takes its turn for inspection. A five-minute warning will be broadcast for each restarting region. Additional warnings will be broadcast to regions where multiple restarts are necessary. Please be cautious about going AFK for extended periods in the middle of build sessions or handling no-copy objects, as you may miss the shutdown warnings. Please keep an eye on this blog for further updates.
The reason for the maintenance remains unclear. Nalates Urriah reports that they questioned Oz Linden about this at the Open Source User Group and Oz’s answer was :
They’re doing some checks on some of our server hardware that requires that they take them down briefly. I don’t believe that all regions will be affected, but I’m not sure.
However one positive is that maintenance such as this suggests Linden Lab very much have their on the Second Life ball.
Whereas it would be nice and it might even be exciting to some of us, to know exactly what the nature of this maintenance is, it’s not that unusual for a company to have to restart servers or perform extended maintenance from time to time. Those who have been around for a while will remember much larger outages and disruptions in years gone by.
However as the advice suggests, be careful when you’re going AFK and in the middle of building, be careful with no copy items and keep an eye out for the warnings. Things may be a little bumpy for some folk, just hold on tight.