First off we want to apologize for not keeping up with our updates like we wanted to in the past, but this is something we are looking to get back into the groove of doing here very soon. We are quite busy and have a lot of things in the works, and our client base just keeps growing, which has meant our servers have had to grow. So instead of doing bullet updates, we are going to just have blogs that hit on key points of what is going on at Zetamex.
ZetaPanel Development
We been working on ZetaPanel 2.0 for quite some time now, and we just can’t seem to find the most secure way to build it. We really don’t want to release a product that is vulnerable to attacks or allows our customers to have their accounts hijacked. We also want it to be easy to use, while also being clean and friendly.
We don’t have a release date, but we wanted to toss out some of the features we expect to be included in the release of ZetaPanel 2.0 some will be included and some will come with extra cost. These features include: Restful API, Themeing, Ajax Response, Region Access Statistics, Live Region Status, Backup Utilities, Rename Region, Move Region Cords, and more to come. This is a lot of work on our part, and we are very happy to say we can’t wait to finish and show it off. The sleek interface is built on top of Bootstrap to ensure a very nice and crisp feeling while in the control panel.
OpenSim For The Masses
It came to our attention quite quickly, that people on both end of the spectrum responded to our ending of free accounts. Some people wanted insight to this, and we had to close it down was due to the fact in the recent months we have nearly tripled our user base. With the introduction of many of our new tools coming out, such as ZetaPanel 2.0 it was actually a technical road block to keep the free service.
The way our back-end is being rewired, wouldn’t work for how our free customers were setup. Some people might say, why not just change it to work with how the new setup will be then, right? Well, that is not as simple nor affordable as you would think. Currently the free plans which are expiring run on shared instances with other regions of the other free users, with our new system we are installing with ZetaPanel 2.0 that would not be possible. We would have to put each user on their own simulator, which if we did that would increase overhead, thus increasing server costs. ZetaPanel 2.0 is literally being built into our servers, and running not as a stack on top, but as a built in service to better let us serve our customers in here in the future.
So with hearing the true cries of some people just can’t host their own regions, we wanted to do something about that. Giving everyone the chance to experience OpenSim, and well that is going to be a bit financially hard to do in the beginning but we hope that users will pitch in what they can. Our free service will also be allowing the region to attach to OSgrid, Metropolis, or ZetaWorlds. We will not favor one grid over the other, all get the same free features. At a “pay what you can, when you can” pricing model. Something that we think will actually sell, and it will be opened up for people who want to sponsor the program for those who just join for free to help us cover those costs, where their names will be on the special sub site as sponsors of the program.
We are still working out of the details of this program, and we want it to succeed not just so we can eat at night, but so that everyone can enjoy OpenSim, that wants to enjoy OpenSim. We know that OpenSim is the future, and we want to be ready for when that happens, and be the company known that lead the way to the provide an easy way in.
ZetaWorlds
The ZetaWorlds project has a lot of stuff going on right now, especially many things we haven’t been very public about as it may disappoint some people. But we wanted to share some of the things we have been using, which we don’t recommend for production use just yet, unless you know what your doing.
First off, we been doing our best to help out Fernando of
Oliveira Virtual Lands, another OpenSim hosting provider specializing in region/simulator hosting. He has been hard at work on the PostgreSQL database functions of OpenSim and we have been doing our best at assisting him as much as we can along the way. Though many of our contribution had been reverted, due to finding out their were better ways.
He has been working on a module for the PostgreSQL branch, which might not get pushed back into production branch of opensim, and right now I say DO NOT USE IN PRODUCTION UNLESS YOU ARE ABSOLUTELY SURE YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING, AND EVEN THEN MAKE BACKUPS OF YOUR BACKUPS, BACKUP! Which the service is Asset De-Duplication. The way he has currently done this, from what we have tested and seen working, and we use in ZetaWorlds right now, every asset during upload gets md5 hashed, checked against the database, and if it is already there, it doesn’t add it, just links the inventory item to it. This is a major bonus!
Now, at the moment. This is VERY VERY EXTREMELY EXPERIMENTAL, and honestly why ZetaWorlds has the giant warning label on it saying “Register At Your Own Risk” because their is the potential for data loss. While places like the new Nara’s Nook are backed up daily, but so far we have noticed no issues with it for the most part. Only just simple maintenance of our PostgreSQL database. It has really surpassed our tests in speed over SRAS, which kinda impressed us as it uses PostgreSQL instead of File Based like SRAS. Now again, I can’t stress it enough, DO NOT USE this unless you are really ready to loose data, and NO, the conversion tool he is working on at the moment does not de-duplicate the assets, and I don’t know if he plans on adding this function. But we are proud to be helping Oliveira Virtual Lands out, to where all grids can benefit from our joint efforts.
