[Update: Reboot of beryllium was successful and our IRC services were restored without issue. Hat tip to our sysops who made this happen so smoothly! --martyb]
Linode, which hosts our servers, is rolling out fixes for the Meltdown/Spectre bugs. This necessitates a hard reboot of their servers, and that means any guest servers will be down while this happens. beryllium is scheduled for a reboot with a two-hour window starting at 2018-01-17 07:00 AM UTC (02:00 AM EST). The outage should be relatively brief — a matter of just a few minutes.
We expect this will cause our IRC (Internet Relay Chat) service to be unavailable. We do not anticipate any problems, but if things go sideways, I'm sure the community will find a way to let us know via the comments.
Planning ahead, we have learned that lithium, sodium, and boron are all scheduled for a reboot at on 2018-01-18 at 09:00 AM UTC.
We appreciate your understanding and patience as we strive to keep the impact to the site to a minimum.
[TMB Note]: Sodium is our currently configured load balancer and we weren't given enough notice to switch to Magnesium (DNS propagation can take a while), so expect ten minutes or less of site downtime. Or temporarily add 23.239.29.31 to your hosts file if ten minutes is more than you can wait.
Previously: Scheduled SN Reboots Due to Meltdown and Spectre; 2-Hour Window Starts: Fri 2018-01-12 @ 10:00:00UTC
Related Stories
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.
Linode (our server provider) is continuing with their server reboots to mitigate Meltdown/Spectre. This time, three of our servers are scheduled to be rebooted at the same time: lithium, sodium, and boron.
From TMB's update to our earlier story System Reboots: beryllium reboot successful; lithium, sodium, and boron soon to come [updated]:
[TMB Note]: Sodium is our currently-configured load balancer and we weren't given enough notice to switch to Magnesium (DNS propagation can take a while), so expect ten minutes or less of site downtime. Or temporarily add 23.239.29.31 to your hosts file if ten minutes is more than you can wait.
This reboot is scheduled for: 2018-01-18 at 0900 UTC (0400 EST). That is about 7 hours from the time this story goes 'live'. We anticipate no problems... that the site should resume operations on its own.
A workaround is to temporarily update your hosts file to include:
23.239.29.31 soylentnews.org
Upcoming: We just learned that hydrogen is scheduled for a reboot on 2018-01-19 at 05:00 AM UTC. Since we can get by just fine for a few hours on one web frontend though, no service interruption is anticipated.
(Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @05:00AM
Secret dump, secret dump, secret dump, secret dump! I'm secreting dumping in this silverware drawer! Wow, why do you look absolutely worthless, as if your life has no meaning at all? Wait... someone hid their hopes & dreams in this drawer, and it's covering in dump! But hold on... there's a single spot where there is no dump, so some hope remains for whoever these hops & drems belong to. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! And the spot is gone, rendering these hopes & dreams One With Dump. Oh, those were your hopes & dreams, were they? What a worthless individual you are. Just vanish already! Vanish from all existences and timelines! You disgrace the very concept of existing!
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @06:45AM
I can't give a shit!!!!!!!
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @06:52AM (3 children)
Can I buy Plutonium? I have a big back yard and want to do some...testing.
(Score: 5, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday January 17 2018, @03:08PM (1 child)
They've been named in order so far. That we wound up with reactive metals as our load balancers, reactive gasses as our web frontends, and noble gasses as our db servers was just a really weird coincidence. We're only up to magnesium so far (carbon and nitrogen got decommissioned and their services consolidated onto boron and beryllium to save on hosting costs), so it'll be a long time before we get up to plutonium, barring insane growth.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Wednesday January 17 2018, @04:12PM
If anyone can show us stable actinides, it's you lot.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday January 17 2018, @05:57PM
Doc Brown knows where you can get a good deal from the Libyans in exchange for used pinball machine parts.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 4, Informative) by pTamok on Wednesday January 17 2018, @08:55AM (6 children)
Thank-you for continuing to provide clear and detailed updates about the service.
I appreciate the work you guys put in.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @09:13AM
Ditto.
Here's hoping that those spammy trollbots get bored soon :)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @01:22PM (4 children)
Hear hear! Hooray for transparency, not treating us like an audience and, of course, boobies!
by nerds for nerds
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Wednesday January 17 2018, @04:14PM (3 children)
Hear hear! Here's to a long and intellectually worthwhile future for SoylentNews!
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday January 17 2018, @04:19PM (2 children)
Boobies are always worthwhile.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @05:11PM
Your man-boobies are appealing to me and I want to see selfies.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday January 17 2018, @06:01PM
I sure hope that is not SN's counterpart to what the green site called "Beta"?
Short answer: No
Long answer: Noooooooooo!
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday January 17 2018, @05:41PM (1 child)
.... I never realized how much infrastructure there is behind Soylent - it's so home-y to me (with familiar commenters) that it just never entered my mind that it would need more than one server.
So thanks for keeping it rolling!
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday January 17 2018, @06:29PM
Technically, it doesn't. Our dev VM runs just fine on a box with less going for it than either of our web frontends or db servers. The redundancy's just there because downtime sucks. Also, it lets us do things like run a varnish cache and keep more of the db resident in ram for faster page load times.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Funny) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday January 17 2018, @05:45PM (1 child)
I used Mohs Scale of hardness for my server names. Talc is my once awesome but now terribly antiquated and slow Pentium II computer, safe from any bugs that might still be lurking in later processors, or so I hoped until Meltdown and Spectre.
For laptops, I used names of different kinds of lava.
In the workplace, Morgoth is the server that has the most hard drive failures. Sauron once ruled the Token Ring network. Shelob sucks all the joy out of sysadmin work. Pippin keeps causing trouble, Butterbur is the email server, and Denethor halts and catches fire.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @10:40PM
were I work we use a boring scheme, functions-(dev|prod|...)-\d\d.ogazisationalunit.domain
sodium would be named loadbal-prod01.infra.soylentnewes.org
Those named are binded to private address and not published externally, the active load balancer is given a public vip
I came up with the naming scheme
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Wednesday January 17 2018, @06:36PM
Did you remember to keep a replacement beryllium sphere on board, this time?