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Still getting grey avatars - anyone else in the UK weith problems?


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This has been going on for nearly a month now. Things worked fine previously, and I didn't change anything to cause the issue.

System layer clothing and avatar skins are not displaying for me, I get just grey (or sometimes white). It is a little random, sometimes I'll get a face and legs for instance but no hands or torso. Often all system layers are grey. Occasionally they will suddenly display properly after bring logged in a long time (20 minutes plus). Sometimes I log in and everything works fine, but mostly, say nine times out of ten, I have problems. This is on my own avatars and others, in all regions.

It happens in Firestorm and the official viewer, on all three of my premium accounts, on two different PCs. I have jumpred through hoopes for weeks now, the last week with tech support who have concluded that they cannot replicate the issue. I can replicate every day! I have tried everything like resetting my avatar, completely changing outfits, clearing my cache, even fully wiping and resinstalling the software. Given that it is happening on all my accounts and hardware though, many of those things really were clearly not the issue. I did them anyway, as asked by support.

I have even been so far as to connect directly to my ADSL modem (it's a simple half-bridge router, no NAT or firewall) and give my PC a public IP address. No difference. I run a couple of servers behind the Cisco 1841 router that connects to the ADSL modem, with multiple services on them, and everything works. I'm a Cisco engineer, so I'm not exactly a newbie at this. I can find no reason why there should be issues with SL traffic on my end.

So, after that long-winded post, is anyone else in the UK having issues like mine?

All I can come up with is issues with the newish CDN system, since it was around that time that Istarted having the trouble.If it's just me though, then probably not and I need to take drastic steps like change my ISP or something, which would be mayhem because I have a very good service, routed /29 public IP block and easily make maximum speed on the 21CN ADSL line.

Edit to clarify: everything else around me loads fine, and prim/sculpt/mesh clothing works, just not system layers. Yesterday, after clearing cache and resetting my avatar (as asked by CS) I relogged, still had a grey avatar 20 minutes later, while everything around me had displayed perfectly. I TP'd to a big store, and other avatars stayed grey while the entire store downloaded and displayed in a minute or so. Ten minutes later, still grey clothing. I gave up.

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     I've had a simlar problem using Singularity. I just played around a bit with debug settings and may have stumbled across something.

     In debug mode I set a flag to render my av invisible. ( I then turned the flag off but I stayed invisible).... In the Advanced menu I rebaked my character and now there is no more grey.

Not sure how this works, but so far so good. I've tried relogging and have teleported to different regions with no problems so far. 

 

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Thanks, I'll try those suggestions.

I am on viewer 3_7_21_296734 beta, which still has issues, although I think it is slightly better than Firestorm in this matter. Only slightly though, and I often end up as just a cloud with it.

As luck would have it, I've logged in tonight with Firestorm and can actually see myself. Took about 3 to 4 minutes to get the system layers, but I got them this time.

So I'm going to enjoy myself tonight, and try out the next beta etc tomorrow.

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Have you tried changing over to Google DNS? Instructions here: https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/docs/using

If that doesn't help, you should file a JIRA issue.

Include a paste of all your system information from Help -> About Second Life.

Also run a session where you reproduce the grey avatar problem on other avatars as well as yourself (the longer session the better), then logout and zip up your viewer logs folder and attach it to your JIRA issue using More Actions -> Attach files.

This page tells you where to find your logs folder.

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I'll give Google's DNS a try. I usually use OpenDNS. I'll probably end ip filing a JIRA too, thanks for the information.

It will have to wait a few days though. My system HD decided to die this morning, just after I had logged in to SL and was enjoying another good login. Typical!

So, tomorrow I'm going to buy a nice 1TB SSD and rebuild my PC. In the meantime, SL will have to wait :(

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For the record, as embarrassing as it is (I'm supposed to be good at this computer stuff)...

It turns out it was my network after all. Having to rebuild and reinstall my main PC meant FTPing to my backup server up in the attic to get some backup data. FTP was erratic, saying it was OK but leaving me with bad files. Huh???

Long story short, I put wireshark taps in a few places and found that my public server was vomiting malformed broadcast packets onto the LAN. It only seemed to do this when fairly idle, hence why everything seemed to work when I checked things out by talking to it. I ended up swapping out the server NIC for a new one.

The FTP problem and, when I finished reinstalling, the SL problems, vanished without a trace.

Quite why this NIC issue seemingly had no effect on anything else on my rather large home LAN, other than FTP to that particular server and SL traffic everywhere, is completely beyond me. I could upload and download to the internet at full line speed all day long, and run any services I wanted. Except SL. I really would have expected some signs of it elsewhere.

Oh well, I'm actually glad it was me after all. Now I can get on with enjoying SL.

In fact, SL is running better than ever; quicker to render, no more 'stuck' textures and I think quicker response to things like land details. Looks like that card has been gradually dieing for a while and messing up my SL traffic.

 

Edit to add: D'oh! Of course. The only time my public server is ever really idle (and hence had the NIC issue worst) is when I run SL, to make sure there is no contention for bandwidth. I deliberatley throttle the server back for that, and started to do so as soon as I thought things were a bit slow in SL. Made matters worse! In fact, that server has been downloading at full 20Mbps line speed all morning, and I've been on SL at the same time, and it runs better! You have to laugh...

 

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