"unable to connect to a simulator"

[Darren Scorpio]

It means the region you are trying to log into is offline. Try login into a different region, if you don't know of one try Pooley.

[Darren Scorpio]

It means the region you are trying to log into is offline. Try login into a different region, if you don't know of one try Pooley.

[valerie Inshan]

It's Tuesday. Weekly rolling restarts: YAY!

[update] Rolling Restarts Main Channel

[update 6:56 AM PST, 20 February 2013] Rolling restarts for the main Second Life server are in progress.

[Posted 10:11 PM PST, 18 February 2013] We will be performing rolling restarts for regions on the main Second Life server channel on Wednesday, February 20, beginning at approximately 5:00AM PST. Please refrain from rezzing no copy objects, making inworld L$ transactions and remember to save all builds.

 

[Darren Scorpio]

Wednesday in my part of town but yeah rolling restarts are a pain in the butt. That's why I don't bother going online Tuesdays and Wednesdays in the morning.

[valerie Inshan]

OMG Darren, thanks for the good news. Since I woke up this morning I've been thinking it's Tuesday. Actually it is Wednesday evening my time... What a relief! The weekend is closer than I thought!!!

[Nalates Urriah]

The previous answers are right. But, it can be caused by other problems too.

You should always look at Second Life Grid Status Reports to see if a grid wide problem has come up. It can take a couple of hours for a problem to appear there. So, keep checking while you try to resolve the problem.

On Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 5 or 6 AM until 10 to noon the servers that run regions are being cycled through a shutdown, software updare, and restart. If you try to log into a region that is in the cycle, you will get a cannot connect. You can get around that.

Before loging in open (top menu) Me->Preferences->General and enable Start Location: Show at Login. This will place a new input field on your login screen. You can type in any region name and try a login. Pooley, Furball, Denby... are all good regions to try. It may take more than one try.

If you are consistantly having this problem, consider other problems like: Ghosts and Connection Issues: I Can’t Login and Troubleshoot Your #SL Connection – This covers some oddball SL problems like ghost avatars and how to do your own ghost busting. Fortunately most of the gosting problems have been solved.