AjaxLife restored

November 26th, 2007Uncategorised

By semi-popular demand, AjaxLife is running again. I assume it works - all I get is the highly useful error “Your account has been disabled. Please visit www.secondlife.com to renew your membership.” - but that’s to be expected, given I cancelled the account.

So there you go. Development is somewhat hard, given I can’t log in. But it’s running. I also finally managed to get around to repairing the login screen, which also no longer relies on strange proxying things.

It’s also been repeatedly suggested that I should uncancel my account. I won’t do so, for two reasons - firstly, I am not aware of anywhere I can go without being harassed by people like Shawn (see his earlier comments before he was auto-blacklisted). Secondly, it’d cost money. I wouldn’t object to that if I actually had good reason to pay it, but I don’t.

Also, still no idea what I’m going to do instead. But also no idea what I’d do if I was there, so… >.>

33 Responses to “AjaxLife restored”

  1. Katharine Berry Says:
    November 26th, 2007 at 8:35 pm

    Postscript - “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)” just popped up in the log. I should really get round to putting a robots.txt file in there. Search engines have little use for AjaxLife, and waste resources. >.>

  2. Gordon Wendt Says:
    November 26th, 2007 at 8:53 pm

    Well once you turn 18 (don’t know how long that is for you but I assume it’s anywhere from 1 year to 5 (min. 13 yrs old by law to signup for teen grid) with a new account, therefore new name, and if you don’t want it to it won’t cost you a cent, when you do feel free to drop me an IM.

  3. Katharine Berry Says:
    November 26th, 2007 at 8:56 pm

    Two years and one month exactly, as of today.

  4. Marie G Says:
    November 27th, 2007 at 12:16 am

    This is a real pity. I can see that the teen grid has no attraction left for you and after reading some of the comments attracted by your posts, I can see that whatever the nature of your disputes, the other participants are sorely lacking in maturity (something one might expect, i guess).

    Katharine, you are a real talent. i so hope you can move on from this. It was a painful lesson about how vicious online forums and dysfunctional communities can be. I’ve managed to survive in SL mature grid without participating in a single one of them (i know the grownups can be nasty too).

    I’m sure that when you look back at this time as a adult, you will realise that your teenage years were amongst your most productive a creative ones. A time when you refined and consolidated your talents and set your future direction. Keep plugging away with your projects.

    Best wishes, Marie.

    PS. on-line flame warriors have been a feature of the internet since long before you were born. You may be amused by this site which contains portraits of every flamer and troll stereotype you are ever likely to meet. See if you can find some of your SL “friends” ;-) http://redwing.hutman.net/~mreed/

  5. Cory Bjornson Says:
    November 27th, 2007 at 1:22 am

    You probably mentioned this already, but, your account is being purged, or is it just on hold?

    You could mute Shawn, Dontay, and Daisy?

    Mercury is transferring in the next week or so.
    And lives in Fort Lauderdale, Florida >.>

  6. Caboose Enfield Says:
    November 27th, 2007 at 5:39 am

    Katharine, IM me. PLEASE!

  7. Caboose Enfield Says:
    November 27th, 2007 at 5:40 am

    Woops. Email me. (kinda) yeah im dumb.

    furrycaboose@gmail.com

  8. Alister Harrington Says:
    November 27th, 2007 at 2:23 pm

    Places to go? You can hang out at my missile base :P It’s the sandy colored building in Reggiano. I’ll email you the front door code XD

    And as for stuff to do in SL, you could go commercial with your 1337 script skillz. :P
    Give it a shot and don’t let the lamers get you down. They just do it because they have no lives ;D

  9. Rheta Shan Says:
    November 27th, 2007 at 2:49 pm

    Dear Katharine,

    I am very happy to learn you have discontinued the discontinuation of AjaxLife. As I said, I understood your frustration and ensuing decision to cut off all ties to Second Life well, but the service has been sorely missed, besides thinking it was an awful lot of talent gone to waste.

    The difficulties of continued development without an SL account are obvious ; contact me at rheta [ dot ] shan [ at ] gmail [ dot ] com if you need a tester and status reporter, as I have been using (or, what with the « strange proxying things » chewing out upstream errors, been trying to use) the service regularly at times I’m not meant to be in SL :).

  10. Alister Harrington Says:
    November 27th, 2007 at 3:23 pm

    I’m a .NET developer as well, so if you need an inworld guy to help out with the tech side of stuff, gimme a shout.

  11. You Rock Says:
    November 28th, 2007 at 6:12 pm

    Oddly, this was working fine this morning (thank you!), but now when I try to log in, it just keeps timing out. Just thought you might want to know. And since they released 1.18.5, I was wondering if that might have something to do with it.

  12. Cory Bjornson Says:
    November 28th, 2007 at 6:59 pm

    Places to go? You can hang out at my missile base :P It’s the sandy colored building in Reggiano. I’ll email you the front door code XD

    And as for stuff to do in SL, you could go commercial with your 1337 script skillz. :P Give it a shot and don’t let the lamers get you down. They just do it because they have no lives ;D

    /me seconds Alister, I have land in Hippoden and Opera.

  13. Zann Canto Says:
    November 28th, 2007 at 9:14 pm

    I just saw a news feed today on ZD net about online bullying.
    http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-6220495.html

    So you apparently are not alone, Katherine. Too bad. The relative anonymity of the Internet seems to bring out the best and the worst in us.

  14. Chilko Tardis Says:
    November 28th, 2007 at 10:37 pm

    /me seconds Cory and Alister, you are always welcome at Borealis or Sentona.
    Chilko

  15. Alister Harrington Says:
    November 29th, 2007 at 7:08 am

    You can use the .One land in Martin for whatever as well :P I’m not doing anything with it XD

  16. TheEditor Says:
    November 29th, 2007 at 3:51 pm

    Seems that AjaxLife is not working.

  17. Rust Pinion Says:
    November 29th, 2007 at 6:49 pm

    Hi Katharine - I’ve loved using Ajaxlife in the past, but for the last month or so during times that it seems to have been running, I have not been able to access the site - Firefox simply gives me the following error:

    Bad Gateway

    The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.
    Apache Server at ajaxlife.net Port 443

    Is there any way around this?

  18. Katharine Berry Says:
    November 29th, 2007 at 6:57 pm

    That basically means “The AjaxLife server crashed.”

    It’s an ugly bug involving the thread pool. And it being exhausted. And then the thing just crashing out. >.>

  19. Rheta Shan Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 11:52 am

    Dear Katharine,

    thank you for explaining the upstream server thing. I was wondering if my office IT people had performed some strange incantation stopping me using AjaxLife, and knowing it is the server having crashed at least eases the paranoia :).

    I have been observing another phenomenon lately : more often than not, when I manage to log on to AjaxLife, all I seemingly do is connect to the logon server itself (I get a welcome message) ; all other connections seem to fail, meaning I can’t search, see my position, the map is blank, my friends online list ditto, and my L$ balance shows as loading. Is that just me ? And if not, is there anything I can do to help hunt down the problem ?

    Thank you so much again for reenabling AjaxLife. Hugs :).

  20. Katharine Berry Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 1:23 pm

    As clarification, the “upstream” message is being generated by the webserver at ajaxlife.net. This webserver is using mod_proxy to proxy to the AjaxLife server running on the same machine. The reason for doing this is twofold - firstly, allowing it to run on port 80 (otherwise the URL would be http://ajaxlife.net:8080 instead of http://ajaxlife.net), and secondly to enable use of HTTPS, thus hopefully making your login details more secure. I’m also planning to have it only transmit the MD5 hash instead of the actual password - this ensures that I (or anyone else) could never see the password, even if I was trying to. It’s important to note that the hash is still enough information to log into SL (obviously), but not other sites using the same password, or the SL website.

    I can think of two possible causes for your problem, Rheta. The first is that the server is simply overloaded, in which case the packets are never being received by my server, because it’s too busy processing other packets (has happened, and occasionally crashes it), or the connection is saturated (which should never happen). The alternative is that there’s a bug in the client that’s causing the message queue to crash out - all of this information is sent my aysynchronous messages, which will get lost if there’s an error while processing the message queue.

    I’ll add some sort of debug data to the “Stats” panel to help determine which of the issues it is, when I get the chance. (I’m in school for the next two hours, 36 minutes and 28 seconds)

  21. Rheta Shan Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 1:33 pm

    I will look forward to seeing debug data on the stats panel. Not that I even dare to think I’ll understand any of it, but if it can be relayed and be put to good use by you, it will be my pleasure to do so.

    If I understood your explanation right, we get the « upstream » message from your web server when it is trying to proxy to the AjaxLife server through HTTPS, and fails because it (AjaxLife) has crashed ? I think I have got that then (don’t even try to explain what a thread pool is to me, or how it could get exhausted :) ). Thanks for explaining so patiently.

  22. Katharine Berry Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 1:39 pm

    Close. You’re connecting to the webserver via HTTPS, and it’s trying to proxy it (connecting via HTTP, because AjaxLife doesn’t support HTTPS), but failing because AjaxLife (the “upstream server”) isn’t responding, generally because it crashed.

  23. Rheta Shan Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 1:47 pm

    I can’t even imagine how boring school must be if you take the time to answer to my dummy questions so kindly :). Anyway, I understand what happens now (and, once I get this kind of technicalities into my head, which as you noticed is not easy, I tend not to forget about it). I am idly wondering if there is any use to alert you to the crashes in such conditions. Note I’d perfectly understand if you chose to tell me that you restart AjaxLife at your sole discretion, and certainly don’t need a slew of « whaaa, it’s crashed » mails in your inbox, thank you :).

  24. Katharine Berry Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 3:42 pm

    Actually I do restart it when I get “waah it crashed” emails - but only when I’m in a position to do so, which I’m generally not while at school.

    That said, I’m aware it’s currently down. Attempts to restart it so far are bring blocked by the school’s firewall. And my phone seems to be refusing to
    cooperate with my remote access setup for some reason.

    (18 minutes left. :D)

  25. Katharine Berry Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 3:53 pm

    That said, I just restarted it. My phone quit complaining.

  26. Rheta Shan Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 3:56 pm

    And 4 minutes to go :D. Ta a lot for restarting.

  27. Rheta Shan Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 4:06 pm

    And your school schedule goes way to explain why the upstream error message seems to persist though my core ofice hours (what with me being on the continent, 5 p.m. are gone over here before you even have the opportunity to restart the server). Another mystery elucidated :).

    But, I’m still wondering (and forgive my entirely non-technical mind for having inappropriate ideas, if that is what they are), couldn’t the server somehow monitor itself, or be monitored by an external service / daemon, for the « upstream » condition ? It seems to me that effecting manual restarts following « waaah it crashed » mails would be a royal pain in the, ahem, lower back :) (/me sends a short fervent prayer to the gods of Akismet).

  28. Rheta Shan Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 4:11 pm

    Of course, the server can hardly monitor itself for crashes, you need some separate process (/me rolls her eyes at her own stupidity).

  29. Katharine Berry Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 4:16 pm

    I check the spam filter whenever the number currently being held changes. So it’s not really an issue.

    The server could probably monitor itself - it’s just a case of me being lazy. I’ll add that to my list of things to look into over the weekend.

  30. Rheta Shan Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 4:27 pm

    Well, most people I know probably wouldn’t call regular manual restarts, through a remote connection over a mobile phone at times, the « lazy » way to do it :D. But I know how you can get into the habit of fixing things regularly until you lose sight of how they could work if they just took care of themselves. It’s not something I can claim to be immune against, by the way :).

    Whatever you chose to do about it, I just want you to know how grateful I (and I think I’m speaking for a lot of other people here) am for all the time and effort you invest in AjaxLife. If there is anything I can ever do in return, do not hesitate to tell me. Hugs.

  31. Katharine Berry Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 5:15 pm

    It’d be more accurate to say that by the time I’m in a position to do things like setting up a monitoring system, I’m too exhausted to do anything.

    There’s been excessive traffic recently. Since sitting in vehicles makes me tired and causes headaches, it’s probably not suprising.

    Still on my way home. *yawn*

  32. Rheta Shan Says:
    November 30th, 2007 at 5:30 pm

    If you are still stuck in traffic one and a half hour after leaving school, the only thing that surprises me is that you get around to do anything at all. Knowing Paris traffic, I can tell you I know what you are speaking about. Again, I bow to you.

  33. KJ Says:
    December 7th, 2007 at 7:37 am

    Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you!! I cannot say it enough! You’re the best Kath! Now I’ve just gotta get past this time out problem I’ve been having… it logged in twice earlier, but now I just keep timing out. Guess it’s overloaded at the moment.

    /me gives you a big hug.

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