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Slrpnk.net outage (feddit.org)

submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 minute 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.

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.