[sldev] Deprecated protocol feature: stray colon in 500 response - 9 MAY 2009

Ramzi ramzi at lindenlab.com
Wed Mar 11 12:27:17 PDT 2009


Just as an update to this: as Rob mentioned, Linden Lab would give 
plenty of warning before changing the server infrastructure with a stray 
colon.

With the release of Viewer 1.22 today, we are rolling out a new process 
for supporting certain Linden Lab viewers to connect to Second Life:
 * Viewer 1.22 (current version)
 * Viewer 1.21 (previous version),
 * and the latest release candidate (1.22 RC11). 

T Linden posted on the Second Life blog about this new level of 
predictability, along with a 30-day grace period to get the word out 
about the announcement:  
https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/technology/blog/2009/03/09/supported-viewer-versions

This means the announcement period ends in 30 days, on 8-April-2009.  
After this, Linden Lab will schedule to phase out its official viewer 
1.20. 
Since the normal "phase out" period is also 30 days, this means that 
after 8-May-2009, residents using the official viewer 1.20 will be 
blocked from connecting to Second Life (and prompted instead to upgrade 
to a newer version.)  At that time, Linden Lab can believe that no 1.20 
viewers will be trying to communicate to the server.  Of course, as 
before, Linden Lab does not plan to block the login by any versions of 
un-official, open source viewers.

Therefore, the change to server infrastructure described below will take 
place NO sooner than 9-May-2009.  However, it will be scheduled for 
completion  *on or after that date*.  After that date, without warning, 
the server response may cease to contain a stray colon, and open source 
viewers based on the obsoleted EventPoll code of viewer 1.20 would cease 
to fully function at that time, without warning.

I hope this clarifies the timeline.  Thanks!

Ramzi Linden
Release Team






Rob Lanphier wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> The current version of our server infrastructure for capabilities has a
> misfeature in it, where 500 responses have a stray colon in them.
> Capabilities are meant to be HTTP-compliant, but this stray colon is
> not.  However, that incompatibility is required to maintain
> compatibility with 1.20.17 and earlier viewers (and their derivatives).
>
> Maintaining this situation is a pain, because coercing standards-based
> infrastructure (like Apache) to do the wrong thing is a major pain.  We
> eventually would like to eliminate this aberration from our
> infrastructure, but that would mean that older viewers would stop
> working.  We'll give you plenty of warning before actually changing this
> infrastructure, but we figured it's best to get the technical
> information out now so that this will hopefully be a moot point by the
> time we announce a timeline.
>
> We're asking that everyone who has a viewer based on 1.20.17 and older
> to either upgrade to a newer base revision of the viewer (e.g. 1.21 or
> later) or apply a fix as described here:
> https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Deprecated_Protocol_Features#Deprecated_protocol_feature:__stray_colon_in_HTTP_500_responses_.28viewers_1.20.17_and_earlier.29
>
> ...with patches attached here:
> https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-12248
>
> Thanks!
> Rob
>
>   


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