November 23, 2011
My Grid is paused
When one thing is true, its that to experience and explore all aspects of virtual worlds you need all the computer power, you can get. Yet my Computer is two years old and originally came with a Vista 32 bit installation with a cheap update option for the then soon to be released Windows 7. While it came with 4 GB of ram, the 32bit Windows systems hid a GB from me, witch did not bother me that much that time, 64bit Systems where said to be all kinds of troubles.
But that changed after I found this new hobby. Because I’m not a gamer I never looked out for graphic power, so I upgraded my graphiccard last month. While the need of ram and processor power immediately dropped for the SL client, on the other hand I needed more and more power for the basic stuff. A website I set up on IIS 7 and MS SQL Server (the Windows webserver and powerfull database) and needed Apache and MySQL running for the Grid too, and that’s before Robust and OpenSim, the two peaces of software that make your grid real, was even mentioned. Adobe Premiere, an advanced video editing Software I liked to use for making machinima, even only runs on 64 bit systems to start with
So I decided to the route of what I wanted to avoid all along. I work in information technology and we have a saying “never touch a running system”. And its oh so true, over the course of two years I installed and organized so many things that I knew it will be very hard to get everything up to the same level again. Because you can’t just update a running system, you have to set it up new from scratch.
So sunday I finally did was inevitable all along. I started to save all databases and a view other configurations, where possible, and did it.
I’m up to 80% of the functionality again, yet, three days later, and I still run into autoupgradeissues, problems my computer had from the start (when it was turned of once it has real problems to boot again), and the restoring of my Grid is not that easy that it looked at first, because there where changes to the MySQL Server itself that I didn’t make a note anywhere about and the saved backup in text form (SQL) did not recreate the database so complete that I could start it again. Since the data is preserved in there, I think I can recreate it complete, but it will be hard work.
So maybe, my Grid will even be down a few days longer – and in the worst case I (Avatar) loose my inventory.
Its a very hurtful way to get a gigabyte of ram I owned from the start, and its not even a technical necessity, its a marketing decision from Microsoft not to allow higher Ram on 32 bit. But it paved the way should I want to upgrade to 8GB (its maximum with the board) and since the problem of all this services running in the background stays I think of reactivating an older computer (Athlon 64×2 with 2GB) for those and keep server and desktop business strictly separated.
Tortured Prim 