[12 Feb 08, 10:31 a.m. PST --teeple]

Well, that was mercifully brief.  A top level regional router in the Southeast was misbehaving.   By the time we figured out roughly where the culprit was, the long haul service provider had rebooted, or hot-swapped, or whatever it is routers need done to them when they get temperamental.

If you find yourself still unable to connect, you may need to flush your local DNS cache.  For WinXP,

• Open a command prompt
• Type:  ipconfig /flushdns
• Dismiss the window
• Retry connecting.

For Mac,

• Open Terminal.app or an xterm session (both apps should be in Applications/Utilities),
• Type:  lookupd -flushcache
• Dismiss the window
• Retry connecting.

*****

[12 Feb 08, 9:55 a.m. PST -teeple]

Some residents (and Lindens) are getting DNS errors trying to connect to Second Life. We’re not sure where the issue is yet or how widespread the impact is, but we’re on the hunt for it. We’ll keep you posted.

[Sunday 12:10AM Pacific] Thanks for your patience, everything is back in working order!

We are aware of multiple intermittent issues and currently working to resolve them.

Website related issues include the Friends List not working and difficulties logging into the Support Portal. Within Second Life residents are having difficulties viewing group members list and periodically seeing “Can’t Authenticate” error messages when purchasing land, objects or L$.

We are sorry for the inconvenience this has caused and will post any updates to the Official Linden Blog as they become available.

[RESOLVED 7 Feb 08 1:18 pm PST  --teeple] 

This protracted battle appears to be over.

 The final fix involved testing and adjusting timeouts at several layers, from Application to Transport, inclusive.

The Web team took the occasion for some other housekeeping initiatives on caches and timeouts.

  ***** 

Those of us who post here occasionally find ourselves in the position of play-by-play announcers. We think it’s important to let you know that we’re aware of a problem as quickly as possible, instead if letting it sit until we can blog a tidy post mortem.Because problems in a heavily distributed environment can be subtle and difficult to thoroughly trace, we sometimes have to relay unpleasant surprises (in the form of the infamous [RE-UN-RESOLVED] tags) as our tech team closes in iteratively on an operational glitch.Having said all that: These intermittent failures with our Website seem to be setting some kind of record for aggravation.Here’s what we know so far:

• It looks like a load balancer’s mostly to blame. A really stubborn load balancer.
• If you get a 500 Error, a 503 Error, or a redirect error, hitting ‘refresh’ in your browser will generally get you a good connection the second or third time around.
• Your irritation is thoroughly understandable, and we apologize for contributing to it with premature reports of resolution.
• Multiple Web-savvy Lindens are focused on this. Some of them, still on the road to work, don’t know that yet. They’ll find out very shortly.
• We’re not going to call this [RESOLVED] again until we’re sure the tag fits.

–teeple

As originally reported Monday, the Support ticketing and chat systems will be off line for routine maintenance this evening from 9:00 - 10:30 pm PST.

4:01 PM    Thank you for your patience. Our Land Store is Available.

Our Land Store is temporarily unavailable. Our web engineers are working their magic and we expect to have it back up and running again shortly.

[3.09 AM PST] RESOLVED - Issue Tracker is back up and running.

[2.30 AM PST] UPDATE - The Issue Tracker remains offline at the moment for maintenance work. It is hoped this will be back soon. Thanks for your patience.

The Public Issue Tracker will be down for a short while starting at 1:30 AM PST this morning.  At this point the downtime is estimated to be less than 1 hour.

[RESOLVED 9:54 - Twilight] The support portal is back up and running. Thank you for your patience during this brief interruption!

Our support portal is currently having technical problems. If you only need to view knowledge base articles, please log in as a guest. We will get tickets and live chat back up and running as quickly as possible.

The Support Portal’s ticket and live chat systems will be off line Saturday, 2 February, 9:00 - 10:30 PM PST.  We appreciate your patience during this time.

 [RESOLVED 10:09 AM PST] The website errors have been resolved. We will keep to monitor the website for any further signs of connection failures.

[UPDATE 09:05 AM PST] Unfortunately, the intermittent problems to connect have spread and may now be seen on any of our websites. In most cases, a refresh or reopening of the page should take you to your destination, though. We keep investigating, and will let you know as soon as we have more information.

*****

At the moment we see intermittent failures to log into our Support Portal. If you get the message Our support portal is currently having technical problems., please close the page and try to reload it.

We are working to fix this issue, and apologize for the inconvenience. We will post any status updates here as soon as they become available.

[RESOLVED 25 Jan 08 12:14 p.m. PST --teeple]

The intermittent access issue has been resolved.  We’ll keep an eye out for a recurrence.

*****

[25 Jan 08 11:04 a.m. PST --teeple]

Secondlife.com and the Support Portal are periodically returning error pages to some Web browsers. If you get one, please refresh your page. The Web Team is investigating a load balancing issue and we expect to have this inconvenience resolved shortly.