So it came as a surprise when, earlier today, my own region restarted. My own region is a LeTigre RC region and there were no RC restarts scheduled for today or, indeed, this week. Only the main channel was scheduled for a deploy. It was even more of a surprise when it came back:
The software version stayed the same (the one we got last week) but the channel changed!
At first I thought this was just an aberration, some sort of glitch, and perhaps a word with the Lab would mean I'd find out why we'd moved to the main channel. Soon though, when I went in-world, I realised it was odder than that.
A region next to the mountain retreat is LeTigre so I went and checked it and.... main channel. Then I checked the mainland plot that Mistress has, which is also on LeTigre, and it was in the middle of a restart. When it came back it too was on the main channel.
It was starting to look like LeTigre was being removed from the grid.
Only... no. One of the Magnum sandboxes had also gone main channel and, when I just went and checked about 15 minutes ago, all 4 BlueSteel sandboxes were also now main channel.
As of now it looks like all RC regions have been removed from the grid (well, not removed, pushed onto the main channel).
This is actually kind of awkward. For one thing it means that the grid status could not be believed because, rather than just main channel regions being restarted, most or all of the grid's regions got a restart. For another this potentially affects people who rely on their being different channels and who site objects on them for good reason.
An example of using different channels would be the CasperVend drop boxes. The advice that's given, which is very good advice, is that you have one set of your boxes on a main channel region and at least one other set on an RC region. This means that there should never be a moment when a box isn't available (because main channel restarts and RC restarts are traditionally held on different days).
As of now the two locations I have, the smaller and second of which was chosen on purpose (the mountain retreat being main channel to balance out the fact that Shackles is LeTigre), no longer serve the intended purpose. Technically I can't assume that I'll always have one set of CasperVend dropboxes up and working at any given time.
Fingers crossed this is just a bit of a cock-up on someone's part. If not... this potentially has a knock-on effect for doing business in SL. It's not catastrophic by any means, but it does mean that there's one more issue to worry about and deal with.
Edit to add: Grid status got updated after today's main channel restarts finished. It says "Some regions originally on RC servers were incorrectly moved to the main Second Life server. We are working to restore these regions to their original server, and they will require an additional restart as a result. Please monitor this blog for further updates." -- so it's good to know it was a mistake (although I wonder about "some" in that -- all the known RC regions I've been to so far seem to be showing as main channel now).
Further edit to add: Woke up this morning to find this in my inbox:
All is right with the world again.
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