[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.
Note: All dates and times are in UTC:
Affected systems:
lithium No Maintenance Required Linode 4GB magnesium No Maintenance Required Linode 2GB (pending upgrade) sodium 2019-10-18 05:00 AM Linode 2GB fluorine 2019-10-19 02:00 AM Linode 8GB (pending upgrade) helium 2019-10-22 03:00 AM Linode 8GB hydrogen No Maintenance Required Linode 8GB neon No Maintenance Required Linode 8GB beryllium 2019-10-21 09:00 AM Linode 4GB (pending upgrade) boron 2019-10-22 05:00 AM Linode 4GB (pending upgrade)
Related Stories
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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 07 2019, @12:07PM (11 children)
Oh, come on. Linode schedules maintenance more often that I do the festive seasons house cleaning.
(Score: 4, Funny) by coolgopher on Monday October 07 2019, @01:44PM (2 children)
Besides, what do we even want this kernel thing for anyway? Can't we just rehash some grains instead?
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Monday October 07 2019, @02:06PM (1 child)
Can we please just find some way to all get along and somehow force Windows Updates onto Linux systems?
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2, Funny) by RandomFactor on Monday October 07 2019, @02:38PM
Yeah, like putting Linux on top of Windows. That should do it. Yeah.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday October 07 2019, @02:07PM (4 children)
Yeah, it's a pain for us admins. No downtime you lot should notice unless you're on our IRC server though.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 08 2019, @04:29AM (3 children)
Is Linode just using KVM?
If yes, does anyone know why they don't just do live migrations?
Shared storage doesn't seem a valid reason for quite a few years now. Ceph's rados block device is reliable, and does not require much more raw disk than they would currently be using. DRBD between pairs of hosts would work, but would require 2x the storage.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday October 08 2019, @07:30AM (2 children)
Probably because they're not migrating storage, they're updating kernels on the host OSes. And, frankly, I'd be shopping for new hosting providers if I thought they did live kernel updates on their host boxes.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 09 2019, @01:43AM (1 child)
KVM allows live migration of VMs (if you have shared storage).
I meant live migration of the VM.
1) migrate VMs off host A to free capacity on some other nodes
2) patch and reboot A
3) migrate from host B to A
4) patch and reboot B
.
.
.
Customer not affected by hosting providers operational issues that customer should not have to know or care about.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by t-3 on Sunday October 20 2019, @01:15AM
Why bother with that when actual downtime is negligible and it's much simpler to just reboot without trying to migrate? If a customer requires 100% uptime, I'm sure they're going to have a plan for that.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday October 07 2019, @02:54PM (1 child)
Linnode takes good care of their hardware, and I like them, because I don't make money from my stupid site.
(Score: 5, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday October 07 2019, @02:59PM
You should come on staff then. We're saving up for our own caribbean island. A couple dozen more millennia and it should be all ours!
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Saturday October 19 2019, @10:23PM
So they should let sleeping nodes lie?
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday October 07 2019, @02:05PM
Wouldn't it be better to be on a hosting provider which does not have these down times? Don't they realize how important SN is?
There's no excuse. No down time could easily be accomplished by simply never performing any maintenance. Ever.
Catastrophe: (noun) Any software upgrade from Microsoft.
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 Saturday October 19 2019, @10:10PM
SN needs "servicing," eh? Hehehe. Servicing, marty says.
Just make sure they are over 18. Or something. Don't want no epstein shit, would you?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 20 2019, @12:08PM (1 child)
"Both sodium and fluorine have rebooted."
Who the hell cares:
a) that this is happening and;
b) what the server names are?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by janrinok on Sunday October 20 2019, @12:36PM
Well, quite a few of us actually. For anybody experiencing a problem it might explain what is happening. And for those of us who try to monitor the site to ensure that all is working the way it should we need to know what is going on. If you would rather not be told then you can simple ignore stories that contain updates such as this, or you can move to a site that doesn't care what kind of service they provide to their community. We are not such a site.