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posted by martyb on Thursday May 10 2018, @01:58AM   Printer-friendly

[Update 5: All done. Nuttin but net. --TMB]

[Update 4: As of 20180509 @ 11:55 UTC, beryllium has been successfully rebooted. This leaves hydrogen to be rebooted in just over 13 hours. --martyb]

[Update 3: As of 20180509 @ 0414 UTC, both lithium and sodium appear to have successfully completed their reboots. That leaves beryllium (1hr45m from now) and hydrogen (20h45m from now) to complete their reboots. --martyb]

[Update 2: The second round of reboots went peachy keen as well. Next round starts at 3AM UTC (7 hours from this story's time) with our dev server (lithium). An hour later the load balancer (sodium) that I switched us off of this morning will reboot. Two hours after that the box (beryllium) that hosts the wiki, mail, IRC, and some other lesser-used stuff will get bounced. If you can't stand being disconnected from IRC for a few minutes, add irc2.sylnt.us (6667/6697) to the list of servers for this network. --TMB]

[Update 1: The first scheduled reboot (of fluorine) was successful. The two-hour reboot window for helium starts 1.5 hours from the date/time stamp for this story. Two hours after that marks the commencement of the two-hour reboot window for boron, magnesium, and neon. We do not anticipate any site interruption as a result of these reboots. --martyb]

We have been informed by Linode (on which all of the SoylentNews servers are hosted) that maintenance is required to mitigate against the Spectre (v1 and v2) attacks. As a result, all of our servers will require a reboot. Historically, any given server is down for anywhere from 15-30 minutes. We have redundancies in place for many of our operations, but there may be some unavoidable downtime. We ask your patience and understanding during this process.

The scheduled reboots are:

Sat 2018-05-05 1:00:00 AM UTC fluorine [1] Production Cluster Completed
Tue 2018-05-08 1:00:00 AM UTC helium Production Cluster Completed
Tue 2018-05-08 3:00:00 AM UTC boron Services Cluster Completed
Tue 2018-05-08 3:00:00 AM UTC magnesium Frontend Proxy Completed
Tue 2018-05-08 3:00:00 AM UTC neon Production Cluster Completed
Wed 2018-05-09 3:00:00 AM UTC lithium Development Cluster Completed
Wed 2018-05-09 4:00:00 AM UTC sodium Frontend Proxy Completed
Wed 2018-05-09 6:00:00 AM UTC beryllium [2] Services Cluster Completed
Thu 2018-05-10 1:00:00 AM UTC hydrogen Production Cluster Completed

[1] Unable to process subscriptions or update comment counts or deliver messages until it reboots.

[2] IRC (Internet Relay Chat) server will be unavailable.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 03 2018, @12:35PM (27 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 03 2018, @12:35PM (#675016)

    Signs you are doing server names right? The name 'boron' tells me exactly dick about what the server does, what it affects, what will go down, etc...

    How about a server named 'database' or 'db01'? I know it's not the popular thing to do and it doesn't impress your imaginary geek girlfriend.

    • (Score: 2, Funny) by realDonaldTrump on Thursday May 03 2018, @02:01PM (16 children)

      by realDonaldTrump (6614) on Thursday May 03 2018, @02:01PM (#675052) Homepage Journal

      When somebody is dumb, he's a moron. And when he's boring, he's a boron. Maybe, probably, boron is the most boring cyber. Wikileaks has some amazing cyber. And they sent my son a very special DM, they said it'll be very interesting if your father doesn't conceed. Believe me, I wasn't about to.

      • (Score: 4, Funny) by DannyB on Thursday May 03 2018, @06:45PM (15 children)

        by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Thursday May 03 2018, @06:45PM (#675220) Journal

        It is shameful when a president knows little about science.

        Here, let me help. Boron is one of the fundamental particles along with:
        * Electron
        * Proton
        * Neutron
        * Crouton

        --
        People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
        • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 03 2018, @11:25PM (8 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 03 2018, @11:25PM (#675390)

          Nucleon [google.com]

          N.B. First responders were nervous when the current generation of electric vehicles appeared.
          Just imagine their apprehension if they had to deal with a crashed vehicle that was nuclear-powered.

          -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

          • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday May 07 2018, @11:45PM (7 children)

            by bob_super (1357) on Monday May 07 2018, @11:45PM (#676835)

            Worry about the big scary Nucleon, and you may miss the fact that most of the alternates are killing and/or polluting an order of magnitude more.

            • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 08 2018, @08:01AM (5 children)

              by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 08 2018, @08:01AM (#676945)

              The nuclear industry hasn't figured out a PERMANENT solution for ANY of the waste they have created since 1943.
              That's now in the kilotons and mostly it's sitting within a few hundred yards of where it became waste.

              ...and it's carcinogenic and mutagenic.
              ...and a tiny spec of the stuff will do the trick.

              Trying to extract someone from a wrecked Tesla that still contains a 360 volt battery in there somewhere would rightfully make someone wary.
              A wrecked nuke, where just breathing the dust|vapors could give a rescue worker cancer, shouldn't make him any less worried.

              ...and, word is, the materials from those rechargeable batteries are extremely recyclable.

              -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

              • (Score: -1, Troll) by realDonaldTrump on Tuesday May 08 2018, @12:19PM

                by realDonaldTrump (6614) on Tuesday May 08 2018, @12:19PM (#676996) Homepage Journal

                Bzipitidoo asked, "what's the biggest expense of running the SoylentNews website?" And the answer wasn't the electric. That's amazing, because electric is so important to cyber. Electric makes it run. If the electric goes on and off, on and off, off, on, off it makes big big problems for cyber. You need electric that runs all the time. 100%. And the only electric that runs all the time is COAL & NUCLEAR. Our coal & nuclear are amazingly cheap -- so cheap that people forget about them. And so cheap that they're closing down. We can't let them close down, because it will put our Energy Grid in TOTAL CHAOS. Like the Energy Grid in Puerto Rico. And our cyber industry will go overseas. It'll follow our factories.

                Folks, we need a SUBSIDY for coal & nuclear. So they stay in business. So we can have electric all the time. Not just when the sun shines, not just when the wind blows. I asked my FERC to do the subsidy for Grid Reliability and Resiliency -- but they told me "no." Every last one voted "no." Very sad situation. And it would be great if we had new people on the FERC. And there's nothing I can do about that. Although, the Second Amendment people -- maybe they can do something, I don’t know.

              • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday May 08 2018, @02:20PM (3 children)

                by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday May 08 2018, @02:20PM (#677027) Journal

                The nuclear industry hasn't figured out a PERMANENT solution for ANY of the waste they have created since 1943.

                Disagree.

                They have.

                Permanently keep it in temporary storage.

                Problem solved.

                --
                People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
                • (Score: 3, Informative) by bob_super on Tuesday May 08 2018, @08:56PM (2 children)

                  by bob_super (1357) on Tuesday May 08 2018, @08:56PM (#677182)

                  Temporary storage can easily be reopened and reused if we somehow run low on nukes during a fifth pass at blowing up the whole world. Strategic asset!

                  If we wanted to get rid of it, we'd bury it deep near a subduction zone, and be permanently and safely done.
                  Whatever OriginalOwner implies, it's only a few thousand cubic meters, and we know how to move that puny amount of material really easily when we want to, and do that every single day.

                  • (Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 09 2018, @12:26AM

                    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 09 2018, @12:26AM (#677267)

                    It was a concept car.
                    It never saw production.
                    In fact, it never made it past the stage of being a scale-model mock-up.

                    The folks at Ford anticipated that a submarine-sized nuclear reactor would, in time, be reduced in size to something car-sized.
                    Now, the things they put on space probes use the heat from fission to power a thermopile.
                    OTOH, Ford envisioned using a mobile reactor to generate steam and have that drive a turbine.

                    A couple of things occur to me:

                    There was a model of Chevy's Corvair that had a turbocharger.
                    It used a water injection system to control pre-ignition.
                    The thing there was that some of the car owners weren't fastidious about keeping water in the reservoir, resulting in engine damage.

                    Another thing is that Navy personnel who operate nuclear reactors spend something like 6 months being trained on those systems.

                    I don't think that the notion of a nuke-powered car ever would have ever seen production, even if a suitably-sized power plant -had- been available.

                    .
                    Now, the early models of GM's 1996/1997 EV-1 used lead-acid batteries.[1]
                    Lead in car batteries gets recycled routinely.

                    Additionally, going back to the early 20th Century, there were some electric cars, so the notion has had some popularity since the advent of the horseless carriage.

                    So, they've had options all along other than burning fossil fuels[2] for transportation.
                    ...and most EV-1 drivers[3] were really pissed when GM wanted them all back so that they could destroy them.

                    [1] The EV-1 used IGBTs for pulse-width modulation to attain speed control.
                    That had to be better efficiency-wise than earlier efforts, but clearly they had things working a century ago.

                    [2] The buses here burn natural gas and produce CO2 and water which dribbles out the tailpipe.
                    So, a bit better than gasoline|diesel (and they hadn't yet extrapolated Venus' runaway greenhouse effect to man-made pollution in Earth's biosphere in the 1950s).

                    [3] Just *drivers*; NOT **owners**.
                    GM would only lease the things.

                    -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

                  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday May 09 2018, @05:10PM

                    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday May 09 2018, @05:10PM (#677505) Journal

                    Yep. If we really wanted to get rid of it, we would.

                    --
                    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
            • (Score: 2, Troll) by realDonaldTrump on Thursday May 10 2018, @02:31AM

              by realDonaldTrump (6614) on Thursday May 10 2018, @02:31AM (#677714) Homepage Journal

              "Wing bangers" -- the name given to wind turbines by bird lovers for the thousands of birds they kill in the U.S.

        • (Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 04 2018, @11:45AM (2 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 04 2018, @11:45AM (#675599)

          The heaviest element known to science was recently discovered by university physicists. The element, tentatively named "Administratium," has no protons or electrons and thus has an atomic number of 0. However, it does have one neutron, 15 assistant neutrons, 70 vice neutrons, and 161 assistant vice neutrons. This gives it an atomic mass of 247. These 247 particles are held together in the nucleus by a force that involves the continuous exchange of meson-like particles called "morons." Since it has no electrons, Administratium, is inert.

          However, it can be detected chemically as it impedes every reaction with which it comes in contact. According to discoverers, a minute amount of Administratium added to one reaction caused it to take over four days to complete. Without the Administratium, the reaction occurs in less than one second. Administratium has a half life of approximately three years, at which time it does not actually decay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which assistant neutrons, vice neutrons and assistant vice neutrons exchange places. Studies seem to show that the atomic mass actually increases after each reorganization.

          Research indicates that Administratium occurs naturally in the atmosphere. It tends to concentrate in certain locations such as governments, large corporations, and especially in universities. It can usually be found polluting the best appointed and best maintained buildings. Scientists warn that Administratium is known to be toxic and recommend plenty of alcoholic fluids followed by bed rest after even low levels of exposure.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 08 2018, @10:51AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 08 2018, @10:51AM (#676982)

            copypasta, see http://www.manbottle.com/humor/administratium [manbottle.com]

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 08 2018, @10:25PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 08 2018, @10:25PM (#677206)

            Finally someone cracked the dark matter / energy problem.

            As everyone has long suspected we're surrounded by assholes!

        • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Gaaark on Tuesday May 08 2018, @08:10PM (1 child)

          by Gaaark (41) on Tuesday May 08 2018, @08:10PM (#677168) Journal

          You forgot Mastodon and Hardon.

          --
          --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
          • (Score: 2) by isostatic on Thursday May 10 2018, @09:57AM

            by isostatic (365) on Thursday May 10 2018, @09:57AM (#677779) Journal

            I remember all that talk about the "large hardon collider" a few years back, I assume it was some form of threesome porn going mainstream.

        • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday May 08 2018, @09:25PM

          by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Tuesday May 08 2018, @09:25PM (#677191) Homepage
          You've forgottem more exotic things like the Bogus Icecream with Concentrate.
          --
          Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
    • (Score: 4, Informative) by martyb on Thursday May 03 2018, @02:08PM (8 children)

      by martyb (76) Subscriber Badge on Thursday May 03 2018, @02:08PM (#675054) Journal

      First off, I also find the server names confusing.

      But, I would point out that there is a reason to divorce the name of the server from its use. A few years back, in an effort to reduce servers costs, several services were migrated between servers. The end result was that we required fewer servers to run the site. (Save money, yay!) Had we followed the suggested naming scheme, and had a server named "fe001", (Front End 001) what do you call it when the IRC services are migrated to it? Some of our servers support multiple, "namable" services... which name to choose for it?

      Though less than self-evident to the casual observer, having servers named this way does serve a purpose.

      I added a column to the reboot schedule with what I could quickly find as to each server's purpose. Am pressed for time or else I could investigate more and provide a more detailed enumeration of what services run where.

      --
      Wit is intellect, dancing.
      • (Score: 1) by mechanicjay on Monday May 07 2018, @11:35PM (6 children)

        I have hated this naming scheme since it was first foisted upon us.
        --
        My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
        • (Score: 5, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday May 07 2018, @11:41PM (4 children)

          Agreed. We should have went with Star Trek ship names.

          --
          My rights don't end where your fear begins.
          • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday May 07 2018, @11:51PM (3 children)

            by bob_super (1357) on Monday May 07 2018, @11:51PM (#676837)

            Are you actually ready to handle all the terrible quotes that would follow any mishap ?
            It's one thing to spend a whole night fixing a broken dependency somewhere after a security update, and another to subsequently refrain from killing the geeks telling you that you should have just inverted the polarity on your di-lithium crystals when your shields went down.

            • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday May 08 2018, @12:36AM (1 child)

              Nah, some jokes just don't get old, they just become running gags.

              --
              My rights don't end where your fear begins.
              • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 08 2018, @10:27PM

                by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 08 2018, @10:27PM (#677208)

                In Soviet Russia gags run you da comrade?

            • (Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday May 09 2018, @04:40AM

              by Gaaark (41) on Wednesday May 09 2018, @04:40AM (#677340) Journal

              The Buzzard canna handle mooch more of this, Captain!

              --
              --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
        • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday May 09 2018, @12:40AM

          by RS3 (6367) on Wednesday May 09 2018, @12:40AM (#677271)

          This has been an interesting discussion for me because I don't think I would care, but it's interesting in that you've all pointed out that it can be a distraction, add an unnecessary layer of nomenclature, confusion, etc. My first ISP, ca. 1994, had servers names "renoir, monet, manet, matisse, degas, ..." Being I like art, I thought it was kind of cool, and I knew what was running on what. I'm pretty boring with server names where it's up to me.

      • (Score: 2, Informative) by pTamok on Tuesday May 08 2018, @09:22PM

        by pTamok (3042) on Tuesday May 08 2018, @09:22PM (#677190)

        Right in the button, server names should definitely bear no relation to their function. That way lies madness.

        As ever, a big thank-you to the maintainers and editors of this site.

    • (Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 03 2018, @07:23PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 03 2018, @07:23PM (#675259)

      >How about a server named 'database' or 'db01'?
      how about a meatbag named 'plumber' or 'pb01'?

  • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday May 03 2018, @12:45PM (5 children)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Thursday May 03 2018, @12:45PM (#675018) Journal

    What's the biggest expense of running the SoylentNews website? Is it bandwidth? If so, seems it should be worth compressing the various files more. Optipng shrank logo_soylentnews.png and topicdevrandom.png a few thousand bytes. But most of all, why not minify the HTML of the main page? Yes, it's not pretty, but that would save about 1K every time anyone loads it.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by martyb on Thursday May 03 2018, @01:43PM (1 child)

      by martyb (76) Subscriber Badge on Thursday May 03 2018, @01:43PM (#675044) Journal

      What's the biggest expense of running the SoylentNews website? Is it bandwidth? If so, seems it should be worth compressing the various files more. Optipng shrank logo_soylentnews.png and topicdevrandom.png a few thousand bytes. But most of all, why not minify the HTML of the main page? Yes, it's not pretty, but that would save about 1K every time anyone loads it.

      Bandwidth is of no concern for the cost of running this site. Counting from the first of this month, our current Linode stats are:

      28GB Used, 28972GB Remaining, 29000GB Quota

      I appreciate the concern, but there are no monetary savings for SoylentNews to reduce page size. I am mindful of bandwidth load to the community... I have a limited bandwidth plan on my internet connection.

      Yes, there are some optimizations that could be done, but this is a purely volunteer operation and there are more pressing issues with bug fixing and the like which take priority at the moment.

      Also, with respect to minimization of HTML, I'll be the first to concede there are benefits to reducing the amount of whitespace, for example. But, that same whitespace helps tremendously in locating and isolating issues that get reported on the site.

      --
      Wit is intellect, dancing.
      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by rigrig on Thursday May 03 2018, @03:04PM

        by rigrig (5129) Subscriber Badge <soylentnews@tubul.net> on Thursday May 03 2018, @03:04PM (#675094) Homepage

        Also, with respect to minimization of HTML, I'll be the first to concede there are benefits to reducing the amount of whitespace, for example.

        Not really: unless you are trying to squeeze out the last few bytes, minimizing HTML (or javascript/css) is usually not worth the effort, because everything is compressed for transfer anyway.

        --
        No one remembers the singer.
    • (Score: 5, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday May 03 2018, @02:14PM (2 children)

      For us? Servers. We've never exceeded our bandwidth cap that I'm aware of. I believe it's the sum of all of our allotted transfer allowances, regardless of which box they originate from, which should be 29TB/month by my math. All the internal IPv6 traffic between the db servers, web frontends, load balancers, and such costs us nothing.

      We're currently running two load balancers at $10/month (though we could probably drop down to the $5/month package for them without issue), two web frontends at $40/month (whose specs might be overkill as well), two ndb cluster database node boxes at $40/month, one dev box at $20/month, one non-website outward facing services box at $20/month, one staff/inward facing services box at $20/month, and one backups box on another provider for I believe $10/month. And regular backups of the vms of our three most critical boxes by linode for $20/month total.

      --
      My rights don't end where your fear begins.
      • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday May 03 2018, @08:09PM (1 child)

        by bzipitidoo (4388) on Thursday May 03 2018, @08:09PM (#675280) Journal

        So, $180 per month total? I surmise that such round numbers means those must be the prices of renting virtual computers from the cloud, or the cost for rack space for real hardware, and not the cost of electricity.

        I've been looking at your Funding Goal, and wondering if there was more you could do to lower expenses. Last time I worked for a web services company, they had quite a few servers in a room in the main office. No reason to rent rack space for things that didn't need massive networking throughput, such as dev boxes.

        • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday May 04 2018, @12:55AM

          Nope, $260 to Linode and another ten to our "offsite" backup server provider per month or a total of $3240 server costs per year. We've been covering that as well as the non-technical business expenses and managing to stuff a wee bit back for a rainy day*. The tl;dr of it is, I've no objection to seeing if we can trim things down a bit more but it's a big task and not a dire need right at the moment.

          Keep in mind that we don't have an office we can just stick the less crucial servers in. They've either got to be VPSes, colocated, or sitting in someone's home office/bedroom with all the unreliability that implies.

          * I don't know how much. Only NCommander and matt_ have access to the account. I think. Deucalion/Juggs may as well.

          --
          My rights don't end where your fear begins.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 03 2018, @07:11PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 03 2018, @07:11PM (#675241)

    We've had seven servers at Linode go through this maintenance already. They were down ~12 - 15 each. All came up on their own without any issues.

  • (Score: -1, Troll) by realDonaldTrump on Tuesday May 08 2018, @01:04PM (1 child)

    by realDonaldTrump (6614) on Tuesday May 08 2018, @01:04PM (#677008) Homepage Journal

    I hear that it's a million times faster than the old cyber.

    • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 08 2018, @10:31PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 08 2018, @10:31PM (#677209)

      You just want a quantum computer so you can ask it to calculate your popularity by mixing the waveforms from reality and fantasy.

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