Browser Login Failure Corrupts REGULAR Logins
Christi Maeterlinck
Login to browser based version stalled. So I cancelled and relogged to home using my regular Firestorm viewer... and couldn't. Waited 1 minute, tried again, success!
A friend who uses a PC, not a Mac, had the same problem but COULDN'T relog with her regular viewer AT ALL.
A message to Technology Forum / Second Life Web outlining the issue received a reply from a Linden saying a) others had had the same problem b) try logging in to a different destination and then TPing to home... and that worked for my friend.
Please take note, for future development of the browser based version
Log In
Gwyneth Llewelyn
Just for the sake of completeness... I have experienced the same issue once or twice, but it's a really tough one to pinpoint!
In my case, I'm on an ancient Mac (the last one that still had an Nvidia card — vintage 2014!) running macOS Big Sur, and I'm running the 'bleeding edge' SL Viewer — so the issue of using the Zero viewer and then switching to Firestorm does not apply.
Sometimes is just a minor annoyance. While the time limit was set at 10 minutes, it seemed like the online session was cut so abruptly that most of the central grid servers still thought I was online, and therefore got hopelessly confused. Sometimes this could be side-stepped by simply logging in to a different region. Sometimes not even that worked. And sometimes, even if it worked, and the SL viewer would show me the scene for the region I was before — and chat worked normally — there were a lot of weirdnesses going on:
- The top bar would show me on a differentregion (one that I usually visited, but not on that day!)
- Very few things rezzed; I'm assuming that only the 'fresh' items in the cache were being used to display what was possible; but since we have pre-baked avatars on the server, these would notget retrieved, and, at best, I could see some floating attachments
- No movement was possible; sitting on a prim would give the usual error message of 'no room to sit' or 'this object is in a different region; try to move closer' (or variations on the theme)
- Inventory would not load completely; whatever would load could not be used (either as an attachment or rezzing on the ground)
- Most significantly: when activating the texture console, it was clear that nothingwas being downloaded at all, although quite a lot of assets had beenqueuedfor download.
- Unfortunately, I forgot to look at the logs on disk, there might have been some more clues there...
Logging out and back in would not always work on the first try, as reported; the situation might persist (i.e., weirdnesses in the content loading)
or
the login procedure would not work at all, say that the region was not available, and so forth.Granted, this happened more on the time-limited variant, and mostly on the first 2-3 days that it was available; recently, I have not experienced any issue when 'returning' to the official 'bleeding edge' viewer.
Gwyneth Llewelyn
Note:
After logging out of Zero, I haven't tried using Firestorm, Alchemy or the Cool VL Viewer (all of which I have installed and use sporadically), so it's possible that these might still be affected by this strange behaviour... I simply don't know!Gwyneth Llewelyn
Let me add further experiments...
Today, I was trying out Zero with the new limit of an hour, which allows for considerably more testing :)
(Note that today is a Sunday — peak time for SL)
On my
first
session, everything went smoothly; so smoothly, in fact, that I hardly noticed that an hour had elapsed and was shocked to see the browser abruptly cutting the connection (I even thought I had pressed/clicked something by mistake!).When logging in again with Zero, I had no keyboard. Which was weird. So I experimented with all my browsers: none had the keyboard available. In fact, during a few seconds, even the
other
applications had lost their keyboard!Once it returned, though, I logged back in with the regular SL Viewer. The horror! Now everything was broken, precisely as I have described below. I
did
attempt a teleport home (it worked) and back again, but when returning to my previous location, everything was totally broken again. I wish I had taken a picture.I now really suspect that when a session is
abruptly
closed, the central servers have no idea that a certain avatar has logged off, and there is some information out of sync. For instance, Zero might inform the region
that the avatar is gone, but not
the central server; you're now technically a ghost, and one thing that SL doesn't allow is for avatar ghosts to see themselves :) All Hell breaks loose otherwise.Eventually, doing a 'regular logout' — i.e., using
Quit
— would finally signal the central servers that I was
logging off, and, once returning, everything was fine again.But it's definitely something worth investigating, and I even suspect it will be rather easy to fix.