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Troubleshooting in institutional contexts

Page history last edited by gerhilde.meissl-egghart@chello.at 13 years, 7 months ago

Here I would like to collect problems some of us have encounter when starting up students in our educational contexts, i.e. multiple avatar creation from the same lab, firewalls, etc.

Luisa

Avalon Institutions’ Quick Start Note

This is a note to start using Second Life inside an istitution to deliver courses.

Requirements:

You need a lab with PCs connected to Internet. A fast connection is required but a standard ADSL connection is enough. You also need headsets and a microphones for every PC.

See details of hardware requirements here: http://secondlife.com/support/system-requirements. This link is available from the Second Life main page following the Help menu and then System Requirements.

The requirements are generally matched by any ‘quite’ new PC. The main issue can be given by your PC grafic card. In any case try it to be sure! We were able to run Second Life also on old PCs’ that did not match the requirements and there is a long story or recent notebooks that crash running SL.

Network:

When you are using SL inside an institutional network, than that network must allow the connection to SL.

The main issue you may have in the lab setup is the correct configuration of your firewalls. But the directions of SL support to solve this are very accurate ad useful. See them at: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/How_do_I_configure_my_hardware_firewall_(such_as_a_router)

After that you have configured your firewall so that you can connect to SL, probably you will experience issues in using the voice. The following are directions to solve it: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Can_I_use_voice_from_behind_a_firewall%3F

Set Up:

You need to install the Second Life client. Download it from here: http://secondlife.com/support/downloads
To install it you need to be administrator of your PC.
After the installation run it as administrator and answer yes to all questions about permission for your personal firewall to allow Second Life using the network properly.
Run SL as a standard user. Check the connection, teleport and the use of voice. To test the voice you can go to the Voice Echo Canyon location on SL (secondlife://Voice%20Echo%20Canyon/128/128/0).
Check the network load when 15/20 people are connected from the same lab. The max bandwidth used by SL is configurable, the default is 500kbps. So if your lab has a 100 Mbps connection you should have up to 200 concurrent connections.

Comments (1)

Great idea!

Let me add:

Firewall-problems: If IT-people are suspicious about opening their holy network for SecondLife, you can argue, that only one port needs to be opened and that this one can easily be monitored.

Not all students like it: Do not force anybody to take part. Some just do not like this kind of course. Make sure to provide enough info about the course, so they can imagine what the course would be about, and thus make an informed decision whether to join or not.

Gerhilde

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