[Updated to correct time of neon CPU's spiking. --martyb]
We experienced an unexpected outage of the site this morning (20190110 00:15-07:45 UTC). At shortly after midnight approximately 0415 (UTC), CPU usage on neon suddenly pegged at 400% and things went downhill from there. Am not sure at this point what happened between 0015 and 0415.
Root cause is being investigated, but for now it seems the site is back up and working. Please let us know if you have any issues.
Note: you may need to have your browser ignore its cache (e.g. refresh with Ctrl+F5) and bring down everything fresh.
FWIW, system came back up after we rebooted neon (using the Linode manager page), and then bounced varnishd on fluorine and hydrogen (/home/bob/bin/bounce on each.)
Many thanks go to SemperOSS and cosurgi for problem determination and steps to rectify and FatPhil for his cheerleading!
[Update: TMB] So, the deal was that some unknown time in the past the ndb database node on helium had gone down. This wasn't a problem since we run a clustered database but nobody noticing it was. Then last night something caused neon to lose its cheese. Since it hosts the other node of the db, we had no db for a while. Bytram(martyb) has sysadmin powers for when unpleasant substances of various types hit the fan and thankfully he knew enough to get the neon db node back up and bounce apache/varnish on the web frontends, so kudos to him and all the folks who were backseat driving at the time due to lack of admin perms on their parts.
My brain's currently fried from going from asleep to OMGWTFBBQ without so much as a cup of coffee and a cigarette first, so I'm not going to dig into the root causes until it unfries itself but as a stopgap we have four more staff with shiny, new admin access that I'll be emergency bootcamping in the very near future. There's also going to be some monitoring reimplemented very soon so we notice this kind nonsense before it blows up in our faces again. I'll either update and bump this story or post a new one if we manage to figure out what the root causes were but at the moment the logs aren't being particularly helpful.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by realDonaldTrump on Thursday January 10 2019, @01:29PM (15 children)
And possibly many people thought so. But, it wasn't. Very important lesson!!!!
The modern digital is something you can't count on. Something always goes wrong. And you almost have to be Einstein to figure it out. Crazy!
(Score: 4, Funny) by bzipitidoo on Thursday January 10 2019, @01:54PM (9 children)
Russian hackers? If anyone would know, it's those who are colluding with them. How much money did they ask? What's SolyentNews worth?
(Score: 4, Funny) by ewk on Thursday January 10 2019, @02:40PM (7 children)
"What's SolyentNews worth?"
Not sure, but SoylentNews is priceless :-)
I don't always react, but when I do, I do it on SoylentNews
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday January 10 2019, @03:36PM (3 children)
I think it's worth a buck two-eighty.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday January 10 2019, @05:44PM (2 children)
Lock Ness monster offers three-fifty
All those meta posts recently, it's like website management is hard, or something. Haven't you considered yet that outsourcing it to some Indians would be better for the balance sheet and my stock ?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday January 10 2019, @05:48PM (1 child)
But - but - but - I thought Buzzard was Indian? Surely he's not faking it like certain congress critters?
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday January 10 2019, @07:03PM
You mean, SoylentNews was outsourced to India? :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday January 10 2019, @05:46PM (2 children)
Not sure, but SoylentNews is priceless :-)
Wait, what, I thought it was people? Sheesh, how am I supposed to eat priceless!
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Thursday January 10 2019, @11:37PM
Well, at least for everything else there's Mastercard...
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday January 11 2019, @03:03AM
Slavery's illegal now, thus people are priceless. Dig in.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Gaaark on Thursday January 10 2019, @04:41PM
What's it worth?
Less than $3000 for those who haven't subscribed?!
SUBSCRIBE!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday January 10 2019, @02:14PM
Anyway, on a serious note - remember that the IRC channels exist at times like these.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Touché) by DannyB on Thursday January 10 2019, @02:46PM (3 children)
Who needs Russian hackers when we've got systemd and Intel Management Engine?
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 10 2019, @03:28PM
Devuan users on Raspberry Pi?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 10 2019, @08:33PM (1 child)
They're running gentoo so I'm thinking openrc must have shit the bed while it was supposed to be managing processes.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday January 11 2019, @03:04AM
Nah, the db nodes haven't been swapped over to Gentoo yet. Still Ubuntu.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.