Alt account of [email protected] here.

Our instance is currently down and I can’t get remote access to the servers. It appears that there might have been a hardware failure of the main firewall, which is the one thing I can’t work around remotely.

I am still trying a few things, but I am not very optimistic that I can get access.

The really unfortunate part is that just now I am on one of my rare work deployments abroad, so I also can’t access it physically during the next few weeks and my usual back up that could restart it is not available either.

As something like that never happened in 3 years operating the servers, I thought I can risk it, but murphy’s law seems inescapable 😓

I will try to keep you posted here on any updates, but probably there will not be much I can do for a while. Really bad timing 😥

Edit: we might use this “opportunity” to migrate the instance to Piefed, which has been an idea for quite some time now. I will keep you posted on that.

  • wit@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    I am a slrpnk user. Oh well, shit happens. What makes me a bit sad was that a few months (?) ago something similar happened. Slrpnk.net was down for aa day or two? Don’t remember the exact amount of time. What I do remember is asking if there was intention of adding a second admin and making the point that it would be good to create that sort of redundancy. I was ignored.

    Mid of july is basically 1 and a half months from now. Hopefully a new solarpunk instance emerges, one that is safer from such scenarios.

    Enjoy your vacation and don’t stress too much! Shit happens.

    • Kris@feddit.orgOPEnglish
      5·
      2 days ago

      I am genuinely confused. What makes you think you were ignored? We do have additional admins, the problem is physical access to the servers to replace hardware that seems to have broken.

      We plan to add additional safeguards to such scenarios, but in the end it is a trade-off between reliability and costs. Running a Lemmy instance of our size on a fully managed rented server would easily triple the monthly costs. This would be beyond what I am willing to cover out of my own private pocket, thus making the instance dependent on donations. And that IMHO makes it more likely to be shut down in the future as donations are very variable.

      I am not on vacations, but on a work deployment abroad, which further limits the time I can spend on this. Not that it would have made much of a difference, but at least the domain redirection and placeholder text was only possible to do on the weekend.

      • wit@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        14 hours ago

        Well, I got no reply and I didn’t see anyone else in the “mods:” bit in the bottom of the sidebar on slrpnk.net. I understand that having more admins wouldn’t help in this specific case, but it would help in others.

        Regardless, having a public lemmy instance only ran by 1 person is, in my opinion, a bad practice. And please know that I am not personally attacking you. I am just stating my thoughts. This time you were out on a work deployment. Next time you could be sick. The next time maybe a family member had an emergency and you had to help. And the next time maybe your house caught fire or whatever.

        Resilience and redundancy is extremely important in public lemmy instances. And SolarPunk is, in my opinion, all about community. There should be more (trustworthy) people with the same level of access as you do.

        Regarding the price and all that, maybe that is an interesting discussion to have with the slrpnk.net community? And it would also be good to let slrpnk.net users know how the instance is being ran, what hardware, where, etc, so users can be an educated decision on whether they want to see an instance or not? Maybe providing that info on the sidebar would be nice?

        But again, shit happens. Hopefully this serves as a learning event. If not, so much shit is going through the world, losing a lemmy instance is not something about which one should lose sleep.

        EDIT: I may be missremembering about the whole “something similar happened a few months ago and my question about new admins was ignored”… I think that might have been on mander.xyz and not slrpnk.net. I really can’t fully remember, but I think it was mander.xyz after-all. Sorry! The rest of the post stands though!

        • PirateFrog@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          3·
          10 hours ago

          I see in your edit that you confused us for a different instance, but I want to mention regardless that Slrpnk.net has 3 active admins, it’s not just poVoq (Kris).

        • Kris@feddit.orgOPEnglish
          2·
          13 hours ago

          Regarding the price and all that, maybe that is an interesting discussion to have with the slrpnk.net community? And it would also be good to let slrpnk.net users know how the instance is being ran, what hardware, where, etc, so users can be an educated decision on whether they want to see an instance or not? Maybe providing that info on the sidebar would be nice?

          We have been very transparent about that and documented that in the wiki which is linked in the sidebar. But it seems few people ever read the Wiki and having it integrated like it is with Piefed would probably help.

          I agree that more admins with remote access would be good to have, and we have been working towards adding more (there are already more than one, who are not directly involved with slrpnk, but rather the mother project f-hub.org), but physical access will always be limited by the location (Azores) unless we move to an entirely different data-center (which in turn would make it hard for me to access the physical servers).

          • wit@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            13 hours ago

            We have been very transparent about that and documented that in the wiki which is linked in the sidebar. But it seems few people ever read the Wiki and having it integrated like it is with Piefed would probably help.

            Oh ya. I knew about that, and I am fine with that. Though I think having it behind a link is bad UI. People will not read it haha… It should be presented on account creation, in my opinion. Just 1 sentence “This instance is ran on private hardware and may suffer some down time here and there” would suffice.

            • Kris@feddit.orgOPEnglish
              1·
              9 hours ago

              Sure, that seems reasonable. We will add that when the instance is back online.

              If I forget, please remind me. For sure we will not just ignore you 😊

    • Kris@feddit.orgOPEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      Sorry that it took so long to get the word out. I guess we relied a bit too much on the xmpp server for internal communication.

      • silence7@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        1 day ago

        Even the big operations break in unexpected ways. Facebook accidentally broke the authentication for their door locks when they took the site down a few years back and had to fly people to a datacenter and break down a door to get to servers and restart things.

  • ocean@lemmy.selfhostcat.comEnglish
    1·
    4 days ago

    I this it’s a law that servers run 100% perfect until the literal day one leaves town with zero way to return home. One of the many reasons I got all my services off of unraid.

    Very cool to learn you’re running your own machines. Do you go into detail about this anywhere?

    • Kris@feddit.orgOPEnglish
      1·
      4 days ago

      We have a small write up about the hardware on our wiki, but it is also down right now.

      I think we will share a post-mortem write up of the actual improvements we will do to avoid this in the future.

      One thing I will definitly do is to add a KVM remote management console to one of our server boards and move the main firewall into a VM with hardware passthrough of the NICs (this was anyways planned for a 10gbit network upgrade for the second half of 2025). This way I should be able to reboot and even reinstall the main ingress point remotely, so that only the fiber gateway remains as a failure point that requires physical access.

  • pjusk@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    0·
    3 days ago

    Thanks for all that you do for us and this community! A little downtime won’t hurt anyone. I would also be in gavour of PieFed migration 💙

    • solo@fedia.io
      1·
      2 days ago

      I totally agree with everything you said :)

      I just created an account in PieFed and it looks very interesting because there is the option to create your own feeds! I had the wrong impression that you can only choose from the existing ones. This is so exciting!!!

    • Five@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      0·
      5 days ago

      You’re very welcome! [email protected] / @[email protected] is an incredible admin, and up until now has declined donations, funding the entire instance several years now from his own pocket.

      This current downtime is the exception that proves the rule. I hope he’s not stressing out too much. We’ll all be ready to jump right back into it when he gets back.

      • Kris@feddit.orgOPEnglish
        0·
        4 days ago

        Already thinking about how to make the best of it 🤷 Maybe we can use this opportunity to try and migrate to Piefed? I had this in the back of my mind for some time already and Rimu seems optimistic that it is possible.

        • Draconic NEO@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          4 days ago

          Wouldn’t that mean the instance would completely restart? I mean I don’t know much about piefed but logically it seems like the DB structure would be incompatible. Thus “Migrating” to piefed means a complete reboot, all posts, all users, all content just bye bye.

          • Kris@feddit.orgOPEnglish
            1·
            4 days ago

            Not necessarily, no. We aim to preserve users, communities and posts/comments. Image uploads might get lost though.

            Such an in-place migration will need extensive database operations and likely some support by the Piefed developer (to add support for bcrypt hashed passwords), but we are hopeful to make it happen and maybe this will result in a database migration script other Lemmy instances could also use.

            If this turns out to be infeasible, we will stay with Lemmy rather than reset everything.

    • evasive_chimpanzee@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      5 days ago

      Seriously, I think a big part of solarpunk ethos is combating the notion that everything has to always be available 24/7. Society pays a lot to deliver every convenience like fruit out of season from the other side of the world.

      • stabby_cicada@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        1·
        5 days ago

        And on the punk side of things, anybody familiar with volunteer community action, cooperative events, whatever, knows that sometimes a person doing shit for the community fails to do the shit they were supposed to do because some other shit happened in their life. It happens. We just move on to the backup shit-doer-person or find a workaround for the lack of shit.

        And this is the cool thing about a distributed network like Lemmy. If a giant centralized database like FB goes down, its users can’t do anything. If our favorite Lemmy node goes down, we can log into other nodes until our home base is back up.