SVPortal allows provides a certain amount of grid management for grid staff and administrators. Some of these require permissions to edit database tables that are provided as part of OpenSim. These are required to be specifically enabled in the config.php file for this reason.
Grid Staff ( User level 200+)
Regions / Estates
- All Estates page: view and change every estate on the grid
- Region modal: status, stats, restart, broadcast, change maturity
- Estate Tools: view manager roster, add/remove estate managers
Users
- list, search, add/disable user, change title.
Administrator (250) only
Regions / Estates
- Change estate owner — take/give ownership
- Estate deletion, zero-region estates only
Users
- Change userlevel, email, name (first/last) and date created
Please read the Install.md file very carefully to enable these functionalities.
Cron Scheduler
Region restarts and OAR backup/restore utilise “cron” task scheduler. SVPortal makes a request in a table for a restart or OAR backup in scheduling table, and when that time is reached – the cron processor handles the work. While it is possible to handle these tasks without utilising cron there are many reasons to use cron for this:
- Cron is available on all Linux/Unix systems (cron may not be available on some small shared hosting platforms. However, as SVPortal needs to be installed and run on the same server as the opensim grid, it is 99.99% guaranteed to be available on any server running opensim. Shared hosting providers will not be able to run OpenSim – and so the limitation of not having cron available really doesnt exist in the real world of opensim hosting).
- Windows Task Scheduler provides a similar funcionality on Windows systems (SVPortal may run on Windows but it is not a supported platform and likely will require some hoops to jump through to get it working. It’s very likely possible – but not something I can provide support for).
- Cron is a standardised tool that has been used for decades on Liniux/Unix boxes. It is well supported and documented and in fact “boring” software that just “does what you should expect” and nothing more.
- Delegating processing of long tasks to cron means those tasks are detatched from the website code which is generally a good idea. It means that those tasks wil not hold up a webpage, make the website “unresponsive” or risk cancelling tasks by closing a tab etc.
- While those processes can be sent to background by other processes – it makes those tasks uncurated and may cause unpredictable results.
- As an example – region restarts can be scheduled for a certain time in future. When run by cron – the restart is scheduled for the date and time and THEN the restart will be called – using the “in world” warning time specified. If the restart is sent straight from the website – then it can set the restart to happen after a certain time – but that will be issueing the restart command NOW but with a notified delay before shutdown. It is very likely this will not work for a time very much in the future – plus an in world notification that the region is going down for a restart in 5 hours is not that useful. The only way to get a notification 5 hours from now that the region is going down in 2 mins (a much more useful notification is to SCHEDULE this with cron and when the time arrives – initiate the restart with the 2 min notice period.
- When handling an OAR backup via cron – the cron scheduler is able to pick up any issues that happen along the way and mark the item as completed – or errored. This is “possible” when initiated as a forked process without cron – but it is much less likely able to pick up errors or provide corrective actions than a cron processor running every minute.
For all these reasons (and others) SVPortal will ALWAYS be written to use cron for these types of actions (and likely others in future). Any version of SVPortal that is not using cron for these processes – is a forked version of SVPortal. It may work well for you – but it would not be the official code from Glenys Bieler (and Claude). Some parts of region restarts and/or OAR backup/restore may not work as advertised or have other oddities.