I am inviting the editorial team to take a much-deserved "break" this weekend by using "weekend story spacing"[*] on Monday. This is a long holiday weekend in the United States in celebration of Columbus Day (or Indigenous Peoples' Day). As a result, sites tend to post fewer stories. And, of the stories that are posted, a larger fraction are "filler" stories or fluff pieces, if you will. This, in turn, makes it harder for the editorial staff to find stories of interest to post to SoylentNews.
One of our editors is still on leave and the remaining staff has been stretched thin with his absence. Further, several of the editorial staff are facing real-life challenges that conspire to reduce the amount of time and energy that can be given to posting stories on SoylentNews. Do recall that all staff here are volunteers and what you see here is freely given of their own spare time.
We generally try to post 14-15 stories per day on weekdays, and about 10 stories per day on weekends.
Also, a reminder that Linode has informed us of some server maintenance they will need to perform. Except for a short while on IRC (Internet Relay Chat), any downtime should not be visible to the community. Linode reserves up to a two-hour window for their maintenance, but past experience has show that most prior maintenance is completed in less than 30 minutes and often as little as 10-15 minutes. See our earlier story Linode to Perform Maintenance; Several SoylentNews Servers Selected for Servicing for details. The first of our servers to be affected is sodium whose maintenance window starts: 2019-10-18 05:00 AM.
We will keep you informed as things progress.
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[Update (2019/10/19 21:02:00 UTC): Both sodium and fluorine have rebooted. Next up will be beryllium rebooting 1d12h from now. That leaves rebooting of helium 18h later and 3h after that will have boron being rebooted. Again, any impact visible to the community should be minimal. See TMB's note, below. --martyb]
We have just learned that Linode, the provider of SoylentNews' server infrastructure, is planning a number of reboots.
[TMB Note]: This shouldn't mean any downtime for anything user-facing except IRC. There will be a few minutes where the comment counts won't update on the front page but those aren't realtime anyway and a few minutes where subscription updates will be delayed until the server that processes them comes back up.
Recently, we identified a commit to the upstream Linux kernel[1] as the cause of an increase in emergency maintenance on our platform. After implementing, testing, deploying, and gaining confidence in a fix, we are now ready to roll this update out to the remainder of our fleet. We're confident this will resolve the bug and ultimately lessen the amount of unplanned maintenance for your Linodes as a result of this specific issue.
To complete this, we will be performing maintenance on a subset of Linode's host machines. This maintenance will update the underlying infrastructure that Linodes reside on and will not affect the data stored within them.
If you are on an affected host, your maintenance window will be communicated to you via a Support ticket within the next few days. You can prepare your Linode for this maintenance by following our Reboot Survival Guide[2].
During the actual maintenance window, your Linode will be cleanly shut down and will be unavailable while we perform the updates. A two-hour window is allocated, however the actual downtime should be much less. After the maintenance has concluded, each Linode will be returned to its last state (running or powered off).
This status page will be updated once maintenance is complete.
[1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/1/8/905
[2] https://linode.com/docs/uptime/reboot-survival-guide/
The first server reboot is currently scheduled for Friday, 2019-10-18 at 05:00:00 UTC.
Read on after the fold for more details on the scheduled maintenance dates and times.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Coward, Anonymous on Monday October 14 2019, @03:35AM (5 children)
It's Indigenous Peoples' Day in a lot of places. Anyway, thanks for all the efforts.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 14 2019, @04:03AM
https://www.npr.org/2018/10/08/655640579/columbus-ohio-is-not-observing-columbus-day-this-year [npr.org]
(Score: 2) by martyb on Monday October 14 2019, @04:25AM (2 children)
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 14 2019, @07:40AM
Like where I am, it is Fuch the Spanish Day, since Isabella and Ferdinand of the ReConquista funded the crazed Racist Italian (Guiliani?) to mess up even more of the world that Spain had been able to mess up so far. For example, everywhere that was colonized by Spain has buggering Priests. Coincidence? And everywhere colonized by Spain has cock-fighting, with real cocks. Accidental? And some places have a Dueterte and extrajudicial killings and total disregard for the rule of law. Happenstance?
No, this is why the majority of the Supreme Court in America is Catholic. That scumbag Alito can suck a Cardinal's hat, and probably has. So they think they can just take over, and impose the values of the Spanish Inquisition, which, by the way, No One Expects, or if they did expect it, . . . we'll come in again. [dailymotion.com]
So to the point. My state does not recognize this imperialist "holiday", so I have to go to work. My family members employed by the Federal Government have the day off, so they can solicit squid pro quos from various Foreign Powers, threatening them with "comfy chairs", or worse, meetings with the Donald. I hear the President of Findland has still not recovered.
(Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday October 15 2019, @01:44AM
Thanksgiving here in Canada, just ate too much turkey.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday October 14 2019, @05:40PM
And I get neither Indigenous Peoples nor Guy-Who-Murdered-the-Indigenous Peoples Day off work!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 14 2019, @09:24AM (1 child)
Most people have no idea, but Italians used be considered no better than former slaves here in the US, and were treated accordingly.
In fact, the largest single mass lynching in US history was against Italians [wikipedia.org], not former slaves:
Yeah, we celebrated Columbus all right.
In fact, are there any folks who aren't WASPs [wikipedia.org] that we haven't persecuted/abused at one time or another? Maybe not.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 14 2019, @06:14PM
The WASPs themselves came here because they were persecuted in the first place! It's persecution all the way down, through the whole cycle of history. It's only in this last century that persecuting people has been considered a bad thing.