TrustNet Server’s PSU Blew Up

About an hour ago I noticed the server was off. On looking at it, the power supply was very hot. I thought the problem was that it got clogged with dust and shutdown. So I used some canned air on it, and gave it a good cleaning. Then I plugged it back in. That turned out to have been a bad idea.

The PSU made several loud exploding noises, and bright sparks could be seen inside. Pretty scary stuff since this happened the moment I plugged the cable in, so I had my hand right near the thing. Lights went out.

I unplugged the cable, and turned things back on. Fortunately, the UPS it was connected to survived fine. Inside the server nothing looks obviously burned up, but since this is an ATX case, the PSU provides power even when the computer is supposed to be off, so something might have got fried.

The server will remain down for some hours, as it’s late here and no shops are open. If I’m lucky, and only the PSU died then it’ll go back up as soon as I get a new one, otherwise it could unfortunately take a few days, as I may not be able to get replacement hardware on the same day.

TrustNet won’t be working while the server is broken. If you’re constantly getting errors, reset the scanner. It should fail to login and then shut up. The downtime will be credited towards your subscription when it comes back online.

[Done] Server’s RAID resyncing, please excuse the bad performance

My old UPS had a really worn out battery and was due to replacement. I got a new one weeks ago, but I was counting on replacing it during SL downtime. Only power happened to go out before SL went down for maintenance. So I plugged in the new UPS and all is good now.

Well, almost. Due to the unexpected powerdown, the RAID is resyncing and that’s making things very slow. So if you use TrustNet and notice errors or bad performance, this is why. It should be back to normal in about 4 hours (I intentionally slowed the resync so that things are at least usable, but performance will still be impaired meanwhile).

Update: It’s done now, things should be back to normal

Internal Changes In Progress

The TrustNet server was originally made to service LSL scripts. This has worked nicely for now, but has a number of inconveniences. For example, the format used to talk to clients is rather ugly and hard to extend. Things had to be sacrificed to make it easier to deal with from LSL. Now that not only the in-world scanners talk to the server, some changes are needed.

I’m reworking the server code to be able to produce output in multiple formats. In fact, a good part of the work is already complete. The new code will be able to produce output both in LSL-friendly and XML formats. The later has vast advantages over the former, such as being able to return data with newlines in it, such as comments. It also allows to get better performance — the server will be able to accept multiple commands in one batch and process them as one transaction. This should result in a better performance on the website.

The reason this is being done is because the website is actually a TrustNet client like any other, and doesn’t have a direct access to the database. The current format puts limits on the data that can be transmitted, and it’s starting to become inconvenient to code website support in the server according to limits that only apply to LSL clients anyway.

These changes shouldn’t affect the server’s functionality. If something breaks, please IM me about it.

In-world TrustNet Shop Opened

Now you can get a free TrustNet scanner in-world as well, at the TrustNet place in Sprawler.

For more places where to get it, see the list of locations in the TrustNet page

Where To Get TrustNet

I’ve recently been getting IMs from people wondering where to get my TrustNet scanner.

You can get the scanner for free at:

• SL Exchange
• SL Boutique
• In-world
• From existing users: People who have a scanner already can give free copies to other people by clicking on a name in the avatar list, then clicking “Give copy”.

“Explain” Format Changed

In order to accomodate some server-side improvements, the format of the output of the Explain (click on avatar -> rate -> explain) command changed. The previous output looked like this when Alice checked the score for Dave:

Alice
    Bob
        Dave
            behavior 1
    Carol
        Trent
            Dave
                behavior 0.1

This was rather too long and took too much of the valuable and very scarce script memory. The output was changed to make it more compact, so that more useful results can be produced.

• The avatar being checked doesn’t appear in the output anymore.
• A header was added to the output.
• Rating names have been shortened (”bhv” instead of “behavior”)
• Number of spaces used for indentation reduced from 4 to 2.
• Added the “+” sign in front of positive scores.
• Added comments if they exist (in parentheses)
• Added expiration times if they exist (in square brackets)
• If the output is too long, it will be cut off to avoid causing a stack/heap collision.

Now the same information looks like this:

=== Ratings for Dave ===
Alice
    Bob: bhv +1 (Dave rules)
    Carol
        Trent: bhv +0.1 [00:35:12]

Server Upgrades Finally Done

Today I used the SL downtime to move the server to a new case. The problem with the old one was that it had a non-standard layout, a weird power supply with fans that were failing and cooled hard disks poorly. It also got full of dust quickly due to the layout and lack of an air filter. All those problems have been fixed by moving the hardware to a rack case.

With this change, the server should run very well as it is for a long time, barring disk failure or something else of the sort, and the improved hard disk cooling should make that unlikely.

Upgrade Complete

Unfortunately I’m not home on Wednesdays during SL downtime, so the update had to be done while SL was up. Update took longer than expected, but went smoothly.

Changes:

• Upgraded RAM from 1GB to 3GB
• Resized /var (where the database lives) from 5GB (63% usage) to 15GB (21% usage). Database itself is currently 400MB in size, so there’s lots of room for growth.

Server Fixed

My apologies for the recent downtime.

Due to a rather nasty bug in a script running on the server all disk space was exhausted. Unfortunately I was sleeping at the time, so it took me some time to notice. This is fixed now, and I will be making sure it doesn’t happen again.

Also, I will be adding disk space to make sure I have more warning time.

All active subscriptions have been extended by 1 day. Please tell me of any further problems.

TrustNet Webiste Improvements

Over the last day, I’ve been working on the website a bit.

The first change is the addition of the “Distribution” tab. This allows easily sending a copy of the scanner to all the people you rated positively. To avoid annoying people, only people who don’t have a scanner and have never been offered one before appear in the list. Also, the feature is limited to 10 deliveries per hour. However it also means that you can safely click the button every hour until it’s delivered to everybody, and nobody will get offered a scanner twice.

The other addition is that now every avatar name links to a page where all the ratings for an avatar can be changed. This, combined with the history page means that if you accidentally changed all of somebody’s ratings to “None” (and that way removed them from the ratings list) you can now just click their name in the ratings history page, and rate again as needed.