Alt account of poVoq@slrpnk.net 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.
I have heard of the migration to Piefed, but will it remove the (very cool) aesthetics of the lemmy ? I loved it :'(
I think we will try to come up with a theme for Piefed with similar colors.
Found this post after a couple of days of hopeful reloading of the page! Took another couple of days to log in an old alt just to say I’m glad you communicated this, and let us know how we can help to make it more resilient (if at all necessary).
To the kind soul that was helping me with my greenhouse infested ants (in the unlikely event they are reading here - but iirc they were not from slrpnk.net but just passing by) I’m glad we spoke, it seems like they are harmlessly using my panels for hatching, and then moving on! Related, who has a nice gardening/greenhouse community to suggest? :)
Thanks for the info, a healthy amount of real life awaits then. :)
I knew it was running on solar energy and old hardware so I guessed something like this had happened.
If you need fail-over to awaken a backup system when the primary fails, things can be designed. :)
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 💙
I’d probably make an account there if it moves to piefed.
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!!!
That sounds pretty cool. I don’t know much about Piefed — would we still be able to access posts from Lemmy instances?
Yes, they’re 100% cross compatible. As an example, you can access !piefed_meta@piefed.social from your Lemmy instance seamlessly.
Work trip and server problems. Where have I seen this before?
Yeah, but at least I have not disappeared yet 😅
I see you understand the allusion.
I did not, can you give me a hint ?
The feddit.de admin disappeared on a work trip to Japan. At least that is the official story.
Evil tongues claim he is in North Korea.
I’ve had the opposite–personal trip and work server problems.
It happens, it’ll be fine. Just remember not to stress out too hard about it and it’ll be fine. The solar punk community knows how to survive a server outage in style.
Ouch. Best of luck getting it back up and running ASAP.
Thanks for letting us know
Solarpunks can have a little downtime, as a treat
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.
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.
I will no longer read that domain as “slurpink” thank you
Oh you will. I know the name for a few months now and I still read it slurpnik
Very very bad timing. I just moved to that server and now it is just gone. I have moved to another server. I guess I am glad that it happened now so I know how poorly Slrpnk.net is managed.
If you want a professionally managed instance, you are welcome to pay for a hosted one.
Which is exactly what I did 2 years ago. Turns out the uptime is about the same and the price is higher than 0. But on the upside, if there’s downtime I can (usually) immediately reboot the server.
The server got a little more accounts on there than I initially expected though. But I’m fine with that.
Yeah, I know. Complete Murphy’s law situation.
Out of 3 years of reliable service, this is the one time the server has been down for any length of time, and only due to the admin not being able to be physically present for a wildly unlikely and unexpected problem.
I signed up with them yesterday and then they go down for I don’t know how long. This is my only experience with them.
I know, I’m the one who approved your application.
You happened to sign up right before we’ve had our first particularly bad issue in 3 years. Unlucky, yes, but it’s a bit out of order (IMO) to say we’re a poorly managed instance based on that, especially seeing as you lost nothing besides the time it took to write your application. :\
My loss of time is small true. I will just move on. But keep in mind new users may not be as knowledgeable as myself.
Knowledgeable? Lmao
Does Lemmy let you retroactively deny applications?
As a matter of fact it does, actually 😅
One issue in three years is poor management now? Wat
Anything less than perfection is unacceptable! 😤 /s
I signed up with them yesterday and then they go down for I don’t know how long. This is my only experience with them.
Ok, and?
That doesn’t change the fact this is a one off issue and theyve never had that issue in three years.This is a very big issue for a server no mater when it happens. A sever you can’t reset and you go on a trip ridiculous.
It usually can be reset, it’s entirely unexpected that a component that enables that functionality would randomly break. You’re essentially implying that any admin who self hosts cannot ever leave their house for any length of time without being irresponsible because they cannot ensure with 100% certainly that a computer component won’t fail while their gone, or a lightning storm won’t fry something, or a flood won’t harm the servers.
Like, dude, c’mon. We’re volunteers, and poVoq is running this stuff for free. We’re not an enterprise business with multiple staff on hand to swap out failed components 24/7 so that our ‘customers’ don’t lose millions of dollars.
If anything, this only proves the strength of decentralized media, as we’re able to swap to a functioning node and continue on our merry way while the other is being repaired. Like what an incredible and resilient system considering none of this is making anyone any money.
You’re going to want to try “my little Internet” by Fisher-Price before using this adult Internet we’re on.
You are acting like this is a life or death situation. I think you may need to take a break from the internet.
It looks like there is no enough solar power for solarpunk!
no need to show me where doors are, I will find them by myselfanyway, good luck with that!
Thanks for the heads up, try not to stress too much.
Thank you for letting us know, good luck!
Alt of ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net chiming in, thanks for giving us the sitrep, poVoq!
This is an unusually unlucky set of circumstances, but for the Solarpunks who find their way here, let’s try to make the best of it. If you don’t already have an alternative account somewhere, you may want to create one to use until we’re back up and running. lemmy.dbzer0.com, sopuli.xyz, or lemmy.cafe are some solid choices to consider. After that, you may want to favorite poVoq’s post here so you can check back on any news.
Even without our home base, we can still share the solarpunky stuff we find and create around the threadiverse (though as Tofu mentioned, maybe this could be a time to take a breather to be refreshed when we come back 😄).
Besides, if the past is any indication, time will fly by and we’ll be back before you know it!
Lol love the new username, fitting! :)
Yarr, thank ye kindly, Lazy :p
Well, on the plus side lots of lessons learned and I think I might move at least the xmpp server to an external vps to have a backup communication channel.
Might it also be possible/feasible to send an “email blast” to everyone with a slrpnk.net account? It would probably be quite complicated to send that many emails at once without getting blocked by the major email providers, but hypothetically we’ve all registered with emails…
Just spitballing ideas for the future. Everything’s fine now. Gives me an excuse to spend a little more time on the Canadian end of the fediverse. :)
As email in profile is an optional feature on our instance about 50% of the userbase opted to not share one so we would only reach some people. But yes, getting spam filtered would be another problem of mass-mailing.
But I found a way to put up a simple html error page and will add this later to inform our members and link to this thread.
Not sure about your area, but a wireguard accessible OOB connection is a great piece of kit to keep handy. I use a cheap 768kbps SIM in an Ethernet connected switch into my personal systems. It’s saved my skin numerous times.
I’m sure this is obvious, especially in hindsight, but just mentioning because the existence of IoT LTE data plans for a minimal fee ( $100/year for me in Midwest US) was NOT obvious to me until 2 years ago.
Yeah I had plans to set up something like that, but always other priorities and in this specific case I could maybe access other internal servers but i would need KVM access to reboot the firewall or some other way to cut physical power. And exfiltrating hundreds of GBs of lemmy database wouldn’t work over such a small pipe either.
For that, I’d highly recommend a power conditioner with outlet controls (and preferably sequencing).
Most are pretty expensive, but you can get something like a surgex squid or a gude expert power control for a few hundred here and there, which will give you great data on power usage as well. You can also grab an older model with serial and/or relay controls, and use a pi or whatever is handy to trigger it. Actually have a setup like that in a few racks for clients (mostly orange pis and a couple of Asus tinker boards).
Hope your trip goes well!
This is something that even larger corps struggle with. My old company would buy some other company, lay off a bunch of people, others would quit, and then it was shocked Pikachu faces all around when That One Thing stopped working in an office they turned into a ghost town and, well, no, nobody was going to be there until Monday morning to power cycle etc. True lights out/OOB reachability is WORK. And there’s always going to be a SPOF somewhere that requires hands on-site.
Do what you can, when you can. And thank you for all that y’all have done so far.
Ty for the update! slrpnk is my favorite instance that isn’t my home instance
