We recently received notifications that Linode, our hosting provider, will be performing "Emergency Security Maintenance" as a result of the recently Disclosed Meltdown and Spectre security issues.
So far, we have been informed of maintenance windows for two of our servers: magnesium and fluorine.
There is a two hour window for these reboots starting on Friday January 12th at 10:00AM UTC. Reboots should take on the order of about 10 minutes per server.
The reboot of magnesium should cause no service disruption as it is one of our redundant front-end servers. The same cannot be said for fluorine as TheMightyBuzzard so succinctly summed it up: "slashd and site payments won't work while fluorine's down".
We have not yet received any information as to when our other systems will be rebooted -- we will keep you advised as we learn more.
(Score: 3, Informative) by martyb on Thursday January 11 2018, @10:06PM
From the parent comment:
FTFS:
The key part of that sentence is "on the order of" as in order-of-magnitude (i.e. power of 10):
Not only does the operating system of our server get rebooted, but all of the attendant processes that rehash (the code that runs the site) depends on, such as mysql, apache, nginx, etc.
Does that help?
Wit is intellect, dancing.