“As of May 25, 2021, the Free Virtual World Voice service has been deprecated and we will no longer be accepting new program registrations,” the company announced today. “Over the past 10 years, the community that contributed to this program has evolved to a point that impacts our ability to provide adequate support for the components that this program relies upon.”
“However, we are keeping the service on for existing users,” Unity PR head Ryan Wallace told Hypergrid Business.
He said all existing Vivox users will be getting an email from Unity with the details and will be notified “several months in advance” of when the service will be fully terminated.
“We do not have a definitive date set yet for full deprecation,” he added.
Previously, there was an announcement on Unity’s OpenSim Vivox page that said that the OpenSim service will be decommissioned by the end of 2021.
He also was not able to answer whether that included paying customers, or just those using the free service, or whether existing free users will be able to upgrade to the paid version and, if so, how much would it cost.
“Let me ask about the paid aspect and get back to you tomorrow,” he said Monday.
Wallace declined to say how many OpenSim grids, paying or free, are using the service, and how many end users it has on the OpenSim platform.
Grid owners have been hearing from Unity that the service is being terminated for several months now.
For example, Enchanted Grid co-owner Dawn Rhys-Owain tried to fill out the sign-up form for Vivox in February.
“Then I looked at their help section and saw a post on there from two months ago someone with the same issue and their admin response was they do not offer OpenSim hook up any more,” he told Hypergrid Business. “So I looked at other options and decided Fmod was the best alternative.”
10 years of voice services
I had a small private grid ten years ago, Hyperica, hosted with Dreamland Metaverse. All it took for me to get Vivox voice set up was a quick email to Dirk Brunner, Dreamland’s owner.
Vivox has long been a popular voice system for video games, and claimed more than 100 million active monthly users. It offers clear sound and full integration with OpenSim viewers.
Back in 2012, Vivox bent over backwards to make it easier for OpenSim grids to enable the service, and put a dedicated team in place to help make it happen.
Other alternatives, like Mumble and Freeswitch, never gained much traction due to usability problems and other issues.
I’ll update this story when I hear back from Unity about whether OpenSim grids will be able to switch to the paid version of the Vivox service and, if so, how much it will cost.
I’ll also be contacting grid owners to find out their plans. If you have any information or suggestions, please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.
Two grid owners have successfully enabled Podex for hypergrid visitors to their grids.
Discovery Grid owner Rene Vega, also known as Balpien Hammerer in-world, and AviWorlds owner Josh Boam have allowed hypergrid visitors to buy and use Podex-based local currencies while visiting their grids.
“Thanks to Josh Boam from AviWorlds who was the father of this idea and helped much with the technical details, as well as to Balpien Hammerer from Discovery Grid who assisted in testing,” Podex CEO Jacek Shuftan told Hypergrid Business. “The new feature gives every avatar on the grid, not only the native ones, possibility to buy coins and than use them to purchase products, tip DJs, or donate to other avatars. The coins can be also cashed out to PayPal or transferred to another grid.”
And it doesn’t matter if the avatar’s home grid uses Podex or not, he added.
“The new feature is fully implemented and tested in the two grids mentioned above and first avatars made transactions with no problems so we can expect others to be hypergridded as soon as possible,” he said. “Unfortunately you can not shop on grid B with coins from grid A directly, but have to exchange coins first. We are working on this feature and hope to activate in the future.”
Previously, local grid currencies were limited to grid residents, making them unworkable for hypergrid shopping.
But the grid owners were motivating to solve this technical challenge because of recent problems with Gloebit, OpenSim’s only fully hypergrid-enabled currency.
Gloebit is something like PayPal for OpenSim. Shoppers go to the Gloebit website to create accounts and add money to their wallets, then can spend that money on any Gloebit-enabled grid or region.
Podex, by comparison, allows residents to buy, sell, and trade local grid currencies but users previously had to have a separate local account on each grid.
The new system doesn’t yet allow for a single Podex wallet that can be used on any Podex grid — users still have to buy each local currency separately. But now they can buy that currency without having to create a brand new avatar on every grid.
Now, hypergrid visitors can buy local currency just as if they were a local resident, Discovery’s Vega told Hypergrid Business.
(Image courtesy Discovery Grid.)
A user walks up to a Podex terminal in-world and clicks on the Web link. That takes them to the Podex website.
(Image courtesy Discovery Grid.)
Then they decide how much local currency they want to buy, hit the “buy” button, and purchase the currency using PayPal. In the example above, they are buying Discovery Grid’s local currency, DC$.
(Image courtesy Discovery Grid.)
“In about 10 to 20 seconds, the DC$ purchased appear in the avatar’s balance,” said Vega.
And if they can’t find a terminal? They can use a Podex hud to buy currency wherever they go.
Vega said he plans to make the fix available to other grid owners using the DTL/NSL Money Server for OpenSim for their in-world currency.
“The latest DTL/NSL money module and server code needs a bit of chrome polishing before I share the update to the rest of OpenSim,” he said. “There are some viewer display bugs, and non-standard hypergrid UUID handling to be fixed.”
Grid owners will then need to configure their money system to recognize hypergrid visitors, he said. “There are many variants of this money system in the wild and neither the DTL nor Gloebit money systems play well together without changes to them. I have made those changes and fixes to the one I use in Discovery Grid, and I will share it soon in the OpenSim NGC github.”
Local merchants can see the transactions between themselves and their hypergrid customers when they log in to the Discovery Grid website, but hypergrid users don’t have logins there.
To enable them to see their transaction history, Vega said he’s adding an option to the in-world search page to show transactions.
Local currency transactions. (Image courtesy Discovery Grid.)
“We did some testing, and it works!” said AviWorld’s Boam. He’s been looking to switch his grid from Gloebit to Podex after the latest outage. “Users can have a balane on all grids, no matter where they come from.”
When users teleport from one grid to another where they’ve bought local currency previously, that local currency balance will appear in their viewer.
Josh Boam
So for example, someone from Discovery who teleports to AviWorlds and buys local currency, then teleports back to Discovery, will then see their DC$ in their viewer.
“When they leave AviWorlds the money stays with our grid until they come back,” said Boam. “Or they decide to transfer it.”
Boam said he will help other grid owners who want to set up Podex-based hypergrid-enabled currencies on their grids. They should feel free to contact him at joshboam@yahoo.com, he said.
On Saturday, May 15, Gasworks held a large party, Boam said.
“A few people purchased coins on their hypergrid account and were able to tip without issues,” he said. “The DJs also are able to cash out their earnings or transfer them to another grid without any issues.”
A few OpenSim grid owners have contacted me about price updates, and there have been some dramatic drops out there fueled by improved management tools on the part of the grid owners and lower hosting prices by infrastructure providers.
That inspired me to review all the grid prices on the public grids. To make it a fair comparison, I looked at base prices of standard-sized regions with at least 15,000 prims.
The median price — meaning that half the grids have lower prices, and half have higher prices — was $10 per month, the lowest in history.
The average price rose slightly, from $14.96 in 2019 to $15.18 today, due to one outlier — a $99 region at AvatarLife.
Meanwhile, the single lowest price for a standard region fell to just $2.50, at Neverworld Grid.
OpenSim grid price distribution May 2021. (Hypergrid Business data.)
When you look at the distribution of prices, the largest concentration is under $10 per month.
OpenSim grid price distribution as of May, 2021. (Hypergrid Business data.)
Out of 49 grids that currently offer region rentals, 18 priced them at under $10, eight priced them exactly at $10, 14 grids priced them from $11 to $20, and nine grids had prices of $21 or more.
And that’s not counting varregion pricing. A varregion allows a grid to offer a substantially larger amount of land and prims at lower prices — on some grids, the average comes out to under $1 per region.
ALife Virtual lowered prices from $20 to $10 per month for their basic region, and increased the prim count from 15,000 to 20,000. The land area is also bigger — it’s now a two-by-two region. A three-by-three with 30,000 prims is now $20, and a four-by-four with 40,000 prims is $30 per month. That averages out to $1.88 per 2,500-prim region per month. Full pricing details here.
AviWorlds added 5,000 prims to their standard region allotment, doubled their varregion sizes. A single region with 20,000 prims is now $10 a month, and their largest varregion is an eight-by-eight varregion with more than a million prims for $100 a month — that averages out to $1.56 per 20,000-prim region per month. Full pricing details here.
Barefoot Dreamers Grid increased varregion sizes while keeping prices the same, with a 20,000 prim standard region just $5 a month. But a four-by-four varregion is $15 a month — that’s an average of just 94 cents per region. Full pricing details here.
Dynamic Worldz lowered prices for standard region from $10 to $5 per month. A three-by-three varregion with 40,000 prims is $18 per month, which averages out to $2 per 4,444-prim region per month. Full pricing details here.
Mobius Grid kept the price of their basic region of 10,000 prims and up to 20 visitors at $10 a month but it’s now a two-by-two varregion. And a four-by-four varregion with up to 120,000 prims and up to 100 avatar capacity costs $75 a month, which comes out to an average of $4.69 per 7,500-prim region. Full pricing details here (registration required to see prices).
Neverworld Grid now offers the biggest bargain on the hypergrid. It cut prices in half, from $5 for a 15,000-prim standard region to $2.50 a month for a move-in ready, pre-made region. Plus, there are a few other tempting options. For $7.50 per month you can get a 45,000-prim two-by-two varregion and for $12 per month you can get a 60,000-prim three-by-three varregion — that’s an average of $1.33 per 6,667-prim region. There is also a water region option, equivalent in size to eight standard regions that can hold up to 50,000 prims for $10 a month. Full pricing details here.
NextLife World now offers a standard-sized region that can hold up to 30,000 prims for 20 Euros (about US $24). Previously, the capacity was jut 15,000 prims. Full pricing details here.
Rev World had the biggest price drop of the lot, down from 40 Euros (about US $48) to just 8 Euros (about US $10) a month. This grid also now supports hypergrid connectivity. Full pricing details here.
Vida Dupla lowered the price of a standard 15,000-prim region to R$ 25, or about US $5. Previously, their smallest option was a 25,000-prim region for R50 — which was then worth US $12. Full pricing details here (registration required to see prices).
Virtual Life Brasil kept the price of a standard 15,000-prim region at R$20, but it now converts to just US $3.71 — down from $6 — because of the changing exchange rate. The prices of variable-sized regions has dropped accordingly. Full pricing details here.
ZetaWorlds lowered prices from 10 Euros a month for a 15,000-prim standard-sized region to 7 Euros a month. And a 75,000-prim two-by-two varregion is now 16 Euros — previously, it was 20 Euros for a two-by-two with only 50,000 prims. A 100,000-prim three-by-three region is now 26 Euros a month, down from 35 Euros. And the company also added a 150,000-prim eight-by-eight mega varregion for 30 Euros (US $37) a month. That averages out to 0.47 Euros (58 cents) per 2,344-prim region per month. Full pricing details here.
Here’s the full list of OpenSim grid prices, sorted by price:
Does your grid offer region rentals and is not on our lists? Email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com with a link to your land rental page. This could be a public page on your website, or even a social media post, just as long as its accessible to the public.
I would also remind grid owners to make it easier for people to buy land. Check out the AviWorlds region purchase page. All you really need from a buyer is their avatar name, the name of their new region, and their money. And even the avatar name is optional — do you really care if people buy regions without registering on your grid? You get their money, and some other grid has to deal with their inventories.
There were no apologies. No explanations of what the company will do in the future to avoid a similar shutdown. No acknowledgement even that it has hurt the users of the service.
During a month-long outage, Colosi has posted eight statements on Facebook, nothing on Twitter, no updates on their website, and no direct contact with the users affected by the loss of the service.
The first note was short and uninformative.
Christopher Colosi
“We are experiencing an outage,” Colosi posted on April 6. “AWS believes our service is up but it is not accessible. We have a support ticket into them.” AWS — Amazon Web Services — is the platform where the Gloebit application and data are hosted.
This was followed by a few short updates over the following four weeks with technical details about the company’s problems getting support from Amazon. There were a few details about how the service is configured, but no information about impact to users, or what the company was doing to mitigate the effects of the outage.
For example, on April 11, Colosi wrote, “We haven’t yet found a way to restore or recreate our old elastic beanstalk environment. We are working on dockerizing our service to remove the dependency on elastic beanstalk and allow us to easily deploy it elsewhere. This outage and the one in December were both caused by elastic beanstalk, so we looking forward to getting off of EB and hopefully restoring a more robust service.”
He was referring to the AWS Elastic Beanstack, an application deployment platform offered by Amazon, and to Docker, which is a way of packaging applications into small virtual containers that can be moved from one cloud to another. While of possible interest to other application engineers, these updates were of little use to actual users of the platform.
Meanwhile, even though Gloebit is supposed to be up, some people are still having issues.
The Dynamic Worldz grid still has not seen the service restored, grid owner Danny Cruise told Hypergrid Business.
Grid owners, users are furious
OpenSim grids use Gloebit to provide payment for their virtual worlds in a way that bring in revenues — they get a cut of all in-world transactions — but removes risks for themselves. Avination, for example, once one of OpenSim’s most successful commercial grids, lost $126,000 to hackers, which contributed to its demise.
For merchants, Gloebit is an easy way to accept payments from stores on multiple grids, and have it go into one centrally-managed wallet, kind of like a PayPal for OpenSim. Instead of trying to figure out how to cash out multiple local currencies, they only had to work with one, relatively easy, online interface.
And for OpenSim residents, Gloebit is a way to keep money safely in an online wallet that follows them from grid to grid to grid. If one of those grids goes down, all the money is still safe — just like your PayPal balance isn’t affected if one of the websites that uses it for payments goes out of business.
If anyone could get a payment system like this to work, it should have been Colosi, who’s best known as the guy who used to run the Second Life Marketplace and the Lindex exchange. Today, Colosi works as a software engineering manager at financial technology firm States Title.
Geir Nøklebye
The recent outage — and the series of outages last year — are giving people second thoughts.
“Back when I worked at IBM we used to say that if a bank or financial institution did not recover from an outage within 24 hours, it would be out of business within a year in 99 percent of the cases,” said Xmir grid owner Geir Nøklebye.
Technical issues are sometimes out of your control, said DigiWorldz grid owner Terry Ford. But constant communication with customers is vial.
“Even if the communication is not what they want to hear, at the very least your customers will know someone is aware, has taken responsibility, and they are working towards a resolution,” he told Hypergrid Business. “In the case of the Gloebit outage, many users felt as if they were being avoided, wondered if they would ever get their money, and were upset they weren’t being updated frequently. I believe if you are to provide a service which so many users depend on, you need to have plans, systems, and resources in place in order to resolve all issues, from minor to major. It’s clear in this case, if such a plan existed, it has failed miserably.”
DigiWorldz give users the option of using Gloebit or the local DigiWorldz currency on their regions.
Many users have already asked him to remove Gloebit, he said.
“Some are saying they would return, and others saying they would never use the service again,” he said. “Which is similar to what I’ve heard from other grid owners and users regarding this outage. Hopefully, the lessons learned from the outage will help to make the system more reliable, and will help to mitigate any future issues, but for now, I think many users are lost forever, while others will be willing to try again. I believe if you are to provide a service which so many users depend on, you need to have plans, systems, and resources in place in order to resolve all issues, from minor to major. It’s clear in this case, if such a plan existed, it has failed miserably.”
AviWorlds, OpenSim’s third large grid by number of users, has already switched away.
Josh Boam
“We held in-world meetings with our staff and also polled our residents and we have decided to make a switch to Podex,” AviWorlds CEO Josh Boam told Hypergrid Business. “It is not acceptable for a business to operate like this.”
Neverworld, which converted the entire grid to Gloebit a year ago after four years with Podex, has switched back to Podex.
Even before this outage happened, the grid wasn’t happy with Gloebit, grid owner Govega Sachertorte told Hypergrid Business.
“They were very slow in answering any support emails that we sent to them or in providing any assistance,” she said. “We will still offer it for personal regions if they absolutely insist in having it but I give Gloebit a big thumbs down.”
German World Grid is staying away from virtual currencies of any kind, grid owner Mickie Bohannes told Hypergrid Business.
“Both of the options that exist seem too insecure to me,” he said.
Plus, a virtual currency makes less sense in a community where people want to have content shared for free.
“Despite that, I think it’s a great thing that there are such currency providers,” he said. “My goal is to strengthen OpenSim and to keep people in OpenSim.”
Gloebit alternatives
Podex is the single biggest alternative to Gloebit, but it uses a different operating model.
With Podex, each grid still has its own currency, but Podex provides exchange services to make it easier for residents to buy and sell that currency or to trade it for currencies on other grids. Shopping is much less convenient, though, since merchants have to manage multiple currency accounts and shoppers who teleport to a new grid will have a hard time making purchases there. Gloebit was perfectly positioned for hypergrid shopping — when the service was working, of course.
Another option is to go fully independent, creating a currency system from scratch. That leads to potential security risks, if, say, users buy currency with stolen credit card numbers, redeem it for cash, then the credit cards are cancelled and the payments are reversed, leaving the grid in debt.
That risk is what keeps AnSky from setting up their own currency, said AnSky grid owner Andrew Simpson. As a result, he said, he’ll be sticking with Gloebit — for now, at least.
“Until I can find a better one or bite the bullet and take the risk of using our own home-built system for currency,” he told Hypergrid Business.
Meanwhile, for region rentals, customers must pay with PayPal, he said.
Alexsandro Pomposelli
AviTron will also continue to use Gloebit, but is actively looking for alternatives, said grid owner Alexsandro Pomposelli.
“JOpenSimMoney is great, but it is a paid one,” he told Hypergrid Business. “It charges a per sim amount.”
Another option is PayPal.
It has high costs when used for micropayments, but most grids already use it for things like region purchases.
“I am intending to use PayPal if needed,” said Kashi Takeshi owner of the Virtual Worlds Zone grid. “Gloebit proved to be too unstable to function as a trustworthy money platform for OpenSim.”
Kitely, which has its own Kitely Credits virtual currency, also has an option of PayPal payments on the Kitely Market.
Ilan Tochner
“Virtual currency solutions come and go, and OpenSim has had multiple providers over the years that gained traction on multiple grids but ultimately suffered the same fate,” said Ilan Tochner, Kitely’s co-founder and CEO. “My recommendation for people who wish to buy or sell content without having to rely on the continued operation of such virtual currency systems is to do it directly using real money via their PayPal account. You can use PayPal directly on Kitely Market or using several third-party inworld vendors that support PayPal payments.”
People can also accept donations or rent land using PayPal, he added.
To make it easier for in-world merchants to set up payment systems, there are products available on the Kitely Market.
Ocean Engineering‘s PayPal Rental Box and PayPal Donate Box handle the payments processing, but at a cost of 20 to 30 cents per transaction. Plus, with PayPal, the payment recipient is notified of the payer’s email.
Another option that merchants can consider is sending buyers to the Kitely Market website for the final purchase, said Tochner, by, say, having their product sale sign link directly to the item’s market listing.
“That way when the sign is clicked the relevant page will open in the buyer’s browser and they’ll be able to securely complete the order from there — including in-world delivery using the Kitely Market hypergrid delivery system,” he said.
The process does add a few extra steps to the purchase process.
“The recent outage was vastly mishandled, there is no doubt about it,” said said Vincent Sylvester, CEO of Zetamex Network, an OpenSim hosting provider and grid operator.
But it’s still the only game in town, he said, since the alternatives are less flexible and less secure, he told Hypergrid Business.
Vincent Sylvester
“Seeing the ease at which Gloebits can be sold indicates residents across the metaverse are still purchasing now that the service has returned,” he said. “As we have in the past, we will continue to work closely with Gloebit to aid them in strengthening their service and improving the quality for users.”
As frustrating as the outage was, it illustrates the inherent problems of using Amazon, he added. The company doesn’t provide adequate support and solutions for issues on their network.
And aside from the infrastructure issues, Gloebit’s design and setup, while still needing work, is much better suited for actual commerce than the alternatives.
One of the most popular option for grids creating their own currencies, for example, is the DTL money server for OpenSim, he said. “The disclaimer of ‘play money’ is as prominent as ever and rightly so.”
In addition, the OpenSim user base is forgiving.
“The metaverse has seen grids go down for longer and still somehow retain the majority of their userbase,” he said. “Commerce and money is not the essence of life, thankfully.”
Zetamex Network was one of the launch customers of Gloebit he said. “We continue to work with them to resolve issues and find a way forward for the service.”
He’s not the only who’s betting on Gloebit.
Gloebit Mall on Dynamic Worldz.
As the owner of an independent, non-commercial grid, Phantom Rose, I find Gloebit funds very valuable to me,” said Phantom Rose grid owner Lannorra Sion. “It really is the currency for the metaverse. It allows anyone from any grid to buy things from different creators from different grids. I use it exclusively. If Gloebit does not come back, my only source of buying items I want is through the Kitely Market. Which would be very disappointing. Kitely Market is great, and I do buy often from them, but it doesn’t carry everything available.”
With Gloebit, she can go shopping at pop-up markets on Discovery Grid, for example. “Many of the merchants will use Gloebits and I will buy things that I have not seen on the Kitely Market,” she said. “I will definitely be using Gloebit once their service is running normally again.”
She has been burned over the years when grids shut down, however, which is one reason that, in addition to owning small bits of land on other grids, she also has her own grid.
“Going forward, I think I will buy Gloebits as I need them, and not keep much as a balance,” she said. “But otherwise, I look forward to using their service again. And I hope they stay in business!”
“I plan to stick with Gloebits,” said Larry Schrupp, owner of the Langalf’s Demesne grid. “There are only a handful of users on my grid, and no real commerce at present, so the down time has been a nuisance only. For us it is more an experimental environment. We use Gloebits in transactions on other grids, and it does not hurt me to support it on my grid. I do not really know of any viable alternatives for a small grid like mine.”
“It is good to see them back, I hope they can go forwards now and hopefully get stronger in the future,” added Enchanted Grid owner Dai Rhys-Owain.
Serene Vineyard Island on the DigiWorldz grid. (Snapshot by Maria Korolov.)
DigiWorldz, a leading commercial OpenSim grid, is giving away a years’ free rent for 25 regions, each one a two-by-two varregion with 25,000 prims,
The drawing is free to enter and its open to both local residents and hypergrid visitors — applicants just need to fill out a form before June 1. No purchase is required to enter.
At the end of the year, the regions can be converted into regular paying regions, or simply shut down. Customers can even get full exports of their regions in the form of OAR files, DigiWorldz owner Terry Ford told Hypergrid Business.
DigiWorldz offers free region OAR file uploads, IAR uploads, and terrain uploads, as well as free backups of inventories and regions. The grid also supports a choice of Gloebit or Podex currency, ubODE, or Bullet physics, Xengine, or Yengine script engines, and animesh.
Region owners also get a web-based control panel where they can do tasks like restarting their regions or turn hypergrid access and and off.
The Gloebit outage has entered its second week and there is still no word about when it will be back up
Gloebit is the most popular payment platform for OpenSim grids, in use on about 50 virtual worlds. The service was launched five years ago by Christopher Colosi, who used to run the Second Life Marketplace and the Lindex exchange, but has had a series of outages in the last year.
Christopher Colosi
“We have an outage due to Amazon Elastic Beanstalk not performing how it should,” Colosi told Hypergrid Business. “We are migrating off of Elastic Beanstalk to fix this.”
I reached Colosi via LinkedIn — his Gloebit email account was down.
Gloebit has already moved the service into a Docker container, he said. “We are working on getting that deployed and restoring our service as soon as possible.”
The company’s website is also down, without even a temporary redirect to a status page. The last update to the Gloebit Twitter feed was in 2019. Updates can be found on the Gloebit Facebook page, however.
Colosi first reported that there was a problem on Tuesday, April 6, with a brief note: “We are experiencing an outage. AWS believes our service is up but it is not accessible. We have a support ticket into them.” Then there was a follow-up note on Friday, April 9, in which Colosi said that the company is attempting to rebuilt on some newer technology.
There have been no public comments since, nor any responses to questions users have been posting on the Facebook page.
Of course, other payment platforms are not immune to outages, either. Gloebit’s main competitor, Podex, suffered an outage in March when its own hosting provider, OVH, had a fire at its data center in France.
Grids can also create and run their own payment infrastructure from scratch, but then they are responsible for not only maintaining it, but are also susceptible to fraud. Avination, for example, one one of OpenSim’s most successful commercial grids, lost $126,000 to hackers, which contributed to its demise.
Technical details of the current Gloebit outage
According to Colosi, there’s an issue with Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk that took the Gloebit payment service down and is preventing it from coming back up.
“The underlying cause is likely the change in technology available on AWS since we initially launched the service years ago,” he said. “This is similar to what happened in December. At that time, we upgraded some components including our database which is now separate from our Elastic Beanstalk environment.”
Now, it seems that the Elastic Beanstalk environment still has an old database associated with it which is no longer being used and is on old hardware.
“AWS support believes this is causing our outage and suggested we upgrade it, but AWS won’t allow us to upgrade it or remove it,” said Colosi. “We can’t create a new environment without that database because Amazon no longer supports some older libraries which our service uses. We are grandfathered in on the existing environment, but can’t spin up a new one with that support. We tried everything we could think of and everything that AWS support suggested to get around these conflicts in Amazon EBs system and could not.”
“Moving to a Docker container gives us more control to choose specifically what our servers run and how they are configured,” he said. “We hope to have the service restored soon.”
Colosi used to run the Second Life Marketplace and the Lindex exchange. He is also pitching Gloebits as a currency to non-OpenSim platforms and online games and virtual reality apps, and the broader the user base, the more stable the currency.
