*Yawns* Project Manager Joel Savard just sent out this notecard, thus keeping me from my beauty sleep and dreams about carrots and happy bunnies. Please read below as it pertains not only to bunnies, but all scripted items within Second Life.

SEPTEMBER 30, 2010
*ALERT* Second Life Simulator serialization or deserialization errors

This alert describes a situation that happens occasionally on Second Life, and is the result of a known bug in the Second Life simulator. Linden Lab is working on a fix, and has announced in office hours that they are working on a fix, but it has not been released yet.

Below are three short sections, What to Watch For, What is this About? and What Should I Do?

WHAT TO WATCH FOR
THE TRIGGER: You rez or kindle a bunny or rez some other scripted item – this does not only affect bunnies – and you see a long error message that looks like this (long error message that says “System.Runtime.Serialization” in it):

—- SAMPLE ERROR MESSAGE —-
System.Runtime.Serialization.SerializationException: serializationStream supports seeking, but its length is 0
at System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters. … (usually much longer than this with many more mentions of serialization or deserialization errors
—- END OF SAMPLE ERROR MESSAGE —-

WHAT IS THIS ABOUT?
This error indicates an internal programming error in the Second Life scripting engine. This error is known to be “in the wild” and Linden Lab is working to get a fix confirmed and rolled out, but it is not yet ready to roll out. (This problem, and the status of their fix, was discussed at Oskar Linden’s office hours today on the beta grid.)

WHAT SHOULD I DO?
BEFORE doing anything else, and certainly before restarting your region (which likely won’t fix this problem anyway), please send the following information to Aeron Constantine:
* Date and time that the problem occurred
* Name of your region (or a SLURL)
* What you did just before the error occurred (rezzed bunny, picked up bunny, kindled nest etc.)