Version 5.2 FAQ

Q: My kiosks work for a while then about 2 hours later they quit working!

A: Click your kiosk. Are the items in your main server delivered? If so, good, your kiosk IS connected to the server. If not, and you know for sure it DID work before, the problem may be an incorrectly configured Backup Key server. Make sure the key to your MAIN server is in the .settings notecard of the Backup Key server. If it's not, fix it, and wait, it can take up to two hours for your regular kiosks to update and get the correct key to the main server from the Backup Key server.

Q: My kiosk isn't updating textures! Why?

A: There are a few possible reasons for this. First make sure it's not a Backup Key server problem as per the Q above.

One common cause for this is an incorrectly configured texturefaces setting in the kiosks. Figure out what face you want to update by editing the kiosk, then click Select Texture and click on the face you want the kiosk to update. Hit control+alt+shift+T and it will tell you what face you just selected. THAT face (or faces) is what should be in your texturefaces setting. So for example on your custom kiosk if the face you want to update is face 0, then set texturefaces=[0]. A lot of people just leave the sample kiosk settings in there, which is [2,4] which may be totally wrong for your custom kiosk!

Now there is a gotcha, if you change your texturefaces setting on a kiosk that has already been textured with your texture from the server, you need to force your kiosk to update. There are two ways to do this. 1) Reset the Notecard Version Checker script in the kiosk, or 2) change the texture in the server. You may need to wait 2 hours for your textures on all your kiosks in the field to update. I recommend you retexture your display prim with a blank texture THEN do 1 or 2 above to start with a clean display prim so you can see exactly what is getting textured and what is not.

Another possible reason is that you colored your display face black! If your display face is black, you will see... black, no matter what texture is on it :)

Q: How can I test my texture updates to make sure they are working?

A: The kiosks request updates from the server every 2 hours. You can force the kiosk to request an update from the server by either making a copy of it, picking it up and re-rezzing it, or resetting the scripts inside the kiosk. This will cause the update request to be sent to the server right away. If everything is configured correctly, the kiosk will receive a reply within 2 minutes at most. If it goes longer than that, something may be wrong with your kiosk settings.

Q: My server has STOPPED WORKING! When I click a kiosk I don't get anything any more. Help!

A: There is a very old bug that causes email queues to become "jammed" when a sim is restarted. Sometimes your incoming server email queue will "clog" when emails arrive at your server while the sim was rebooting. You get one email per kiosk click, so if you have a big network and lots of people clicking, you can fill up your server email queue while the sim is down. When this happens, sometimes the queue doesn't get "unstuck" when the sim finally comes on line. Fortunately, the fix is simple. 1) First GO VOTE for this JIRA bug! This problem will never go away until LL fixes this horrible bug! http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-23

2) Go look in the Kiosk.Net user manual on how to move your server to another region. Simply follow those directions TO THE LETTER and carefully CAREFULLY move your server to another region, then come right back and drop the server. Your email queue will immediately unclog as soon as you are in another sim and you'll get a ton of "corrupt email" messages. That means your email queue is unclogged and your server is back to normal!

Another cause may be a crashed script! This is extremely rare but is always a possibility. It certainly will not hurt a thing to simply reset all the scripts in your server. Note that the menus are handled by a separate script so just because you see the menus when you click it doesn't mean the main script isn't crashed. If your server has been running for a LONG time and suddenly stops working, and it's not the problem above, it may be a crashed script and a reset is a harmless way to find out.

Q: My system works for a few hours then stops. When I click a kiosk, I stop getting things from the server

A: The problem may be an incorrect key in your backup key server. If you have a bad key in there, the bad key will be sent to your kiosks when they update (every 2 hours) and if the kiosks have a bad main server key, they will be trying to talk to a non-existant object. If you reset the scripts in the kiosk and it starts working again, this may be why. Make sure the backup server has a good main server key in the config card.

Q: How many kiosks can one server handle?

A: I have tested a maximum of 500 kiosks attached to one server and the server works flawlessly. Going beyond that will be a bit of a mystery at what point the server becomes "overloaded". I have heard of customers going way beyond this number to 1000 or more and not reporting any problems. I would recommend that what you do from time to time is clear your reports, wait 2 hours, then run a report to see the *current* number of kiosks attached to that server. The main reason I put the suggested cap at 500 is because of the storage limitations on the reporting script (see below).

I would recommend that you do NOT distribute kiosks that allow anyone to copy them. If that happens, you can't control how many kiosks there are attached to one server since they just replicate like bunnies out there in the field.

Q: What happens when my server gets completely overloaded with kiosks?

What will happen as it gets really full is that it might be a little bit less reponsive to clicks since it will be so busy processing incoming emails from the kiosks. Also what will happen is that the message queues for the outgoing emails to the kiosks will overload, which means that some kiosks won't get responses from the server if anything on the server changes, but they will most likely get caught up on the next update cycle 2 hours later, so this is usually not a real problem.

The other problem that will happen is that the ".data" scripts will get overloaded with data and crash. You can easily tell when this happens because reports won't work at all or will not complete with a total number at the bottom. To fix that all you need to do is reset the correct .data script. So if the last .data script you see in the report is, for example, .data2, then you know that .data3 is crashed. If any .data scripts crash it won't affect the proper functioning of the server at all. Clearing the reports once in a while will help avoid that problem. The .data scripts don't automatically delete old kiosks, so clearing it once in a while is actually essential and will refresh the database and get rid of all those old records. After 2 hours you'll have an accurate kiosk count.

If you fix a crashed .data script and within 2 hours another one crashes, you most likely just may have too many kiosks. Please contact me, I can give you a fixed set of .data scripts that can handle a larger number of kiosks.

Another big limitation kicks in at 1000 kiosks. Due to an SL limitation, a single avatar can only send out 500 emails per hour from all the objects he owns. This means when you get near 1000 kiosks, whenever you update your server, you are going to start getting outgoing email throttling errors from SL within a few hours. This is not a really big problem since the kiosk will get updated on its next update cycle 2 hours later unless you are using the "texturesets" feature to flip textures on your kiosks every 2 hours, which forces emails to be sent every 2 hour update cycle to all your kiosks. If you lengthen the texture cycle time to 4 hours or more that will help a lot. The only permanent solution is to have an alt purchase another kiosk.net system and set up a server/kiosk system identical to your main setup. Just change all your master kiosks to point to the alt's new server which will help shift future load over to your alt's server. Since the limitation of 500 emails/hour is per alt, you can expand to another 1000 kiosks attached to your alt's server with no problems. I'd highly recommend doing this once you start getting throttling errors from SL in either case.

Q: I keep getting this error after a sim restart: "ERROR: malformed email from kiosk:". What is going on?

That is happening due to a very old bug that causes emails to be corrupted (the body of the email is lost) when email is attemped to be delivered to an object in a sim that's restarting. This means that those messages from the kiosks are lost. Usually this is not a big issue since a sim restart is (hopefully) a short amount of time, so the potential effects are that some customers may click and not get anything, and some kiosks may "check in" and not be sent any updates (if anything has changed) from the server. This is usually not a problem since the kiosks check in every 2 hours, so any missed updates will be sent with the next update.

Please go vote for this JIRA bug to get this problem fixed: http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-1126

Q: I accidentally picked up my backup server! Now what?

Since you picked up the backup server, it can no longer be used to rescue your network in case your MAIN server is picked up. So now it is more than ever important you never pick up your main server. Go ahead and put your backup server back out, it will now have a new key. So the key that's configured in your current kiosks to your backup server is no longer any good.

What you should do is rez your "master" kiosk, get the key to your backup server by clicking on it, and replace the bad backup key in your kiosk config card with that new key to your backup server. Essentially, fix the key in your kiosk's notecard and have it point to the "new" re-rezzed backup server. The reason you want to do this is so that all kiosks that you give out from now on will have the correct backup key in them. No sense in giving out kiosks that are pointing to the wrong backup server. Unfortunately there's no way to fix the existing kiosks, other than replacing them with the fixed kiosk, which really is probably not worth the time since your main server is still there and working fine. As long as your main server is chugging along and doesn't get returned, you'll never need your backup server anyways. So cross your fingers and be extra careful you don't return, pick up, or delete your main server. I'd highly recommend locking your main server when you are not using it to prevent accidental deletion. So in summary I think you'll be just fine... as long as your main server doesn't get returned. If that happens, all your existing kiosks won't be able to connect to the new backup server and will be stranded, necessitating a replacement kiosk.