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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[–] LeighWeighTacoma@lemmy.world 4 points 14 hours ago

I appreciate the update was thoroughly confused

[–] pjusk@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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 💙

[–] nichtsowichtig@feddit.org 4 points 1 day ago

I'd probably make an account there if it moves to piefed.

[–] ocean@lemmy.selfhostcat.com 18 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.org 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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.

[–] Initiateofthevoid@lemmy.dbzer0.com 35 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Try not to stress too much about it while you're away! If nothing can be done, nothing can be done. Solarpunks need to be resilient to things like this anyway. Community over convenience.

[–] Kris@feddit.org 19 points 2 days ago

Thanks, I am trying, but it really is quite annoying to lose access like that.

[–] tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden 94 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Solarpunks can have a little downtime, as a treat

[–] evasive_chimpanzee@lemmy.world 58 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.zone 25 points 2 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.

[–] blazeknave@lemmy.world 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I will no longer read that domain as "slurpink" thank you

[–] WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 1 points 17 hours ago

Oh you will. I know the name for a few months now and I still read it slurpnik

[–] qaz@lemmy.world 18 points 2 days ago

Thanks for the update, good luck with your trip.

[–] Sergio@lemmy.world 39 points 2 days ago

Sorry to hear that! My main account is on slrpnk.net. But don't let it stress you out, "solarpunk" says "punk" which implies "DIY" which means this sort of thing happens. Much better to have an instance run by an admin who truly cares, rather than some soulless corporation.

[–] grysbok@lemmy.sdf.org 32 points 2 days ago (5 children)

This is making me want to create an alt on slrpnk.net , since you're so chill and communicative about issues.

[–] LeighWeighTacoma@lemmy.world 3 points 14 hours ago

He's pretty awesome. He has a monthly thread with updates and actually responds to you too.

[–] Draconic_NEO@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah me too, I'd wanted to for a while but never got around to it. Now I probably never will (unless they get the servers back up at some point in the future).

[–] WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 2 points 17 hours ago

it seems they will, just not too soon

[–] threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works 12 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

communicative about issues

Aren't most admins this way?

*glances at your instance name*

Ah...

[–] grysbok@lemmy.sdf.org 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (4 children)

Lol. Yeah, sdf.org feels pretty hands-off. They have longevity going for them--I've had an sdf account of some sort since 2009 at the latest. The system started life as a BBS in the 80s. The name comes from the anime "Super Dimension Fortress", which I've never seen.

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[–] Five@lemmy.cafe 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

You're very welcome! Kris@feddit.org / @poVoq@slrpnk.net 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.org 8 points 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (4 children)

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.

[–] AccountMaker@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 day ago

That would be so nice if we could move to Piefed.

[–] Draconic_NEO@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

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.org 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Draconic_NEO@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

Oh awesome, I mean I've heard of other platforms like sublinks offering database migration but I didn't think it would be feasible with piefed since unlike sublinks it's very different than lemmy.

[–] tfm@europe.pub 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

What do you like more about Piefed compared to Lemmy?

[–] Kris@feddit.org 6 points 1 day ago

Lemmy has a lot of individual parts that don't interact very well with each other, especially the image host part. Futhermore the main UI is quite a mess and we were thinking of switching to an alternative already, but this would further increase the "too many moving parts" issue. Piefed on the otherhand has an integrated and very lightweight UI, which also has some nice additional filtering and moderation features Lemmy currently lacks.

And I personally feel more at home with the Python codebase, as it allows better troubleshooting and more standartized (Flask) tooling. The Rust codebase of Lemmy has a lot of obscure custom stuff and the error messages are extremely obstruse from a sysadmin perspective.

And looking at the performance metrics of Lemmy, the main limiting factor seems to be the Postgres database anyways, so the theoretically slower Python codebase of Piefed should not have much impact.

[–] PirateFrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 2 days ago

That'd actually be pretty rad if it's doable, especially now that the API for piefed was released and mobile apps are already beginning to support it.

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[–] ZonenRanslite@feddit.org 44 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Work trip and server problems. Where have I seen this before?

[–] mad_lentil@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 day ago

I've had the opposite--personal trip and work server problems.

[–] Kris@feddit.org 30 points 2 days ago (4 children)

Yeah, but at least I have not disappeared yet 😅

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[–] gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 21 points 2 days ago (2 children)

This is actually great timing, i'd say. Just now most of the northern hemisphere is starting into summer. At least i deeply feel it on a personal level that summer is arriving. I take this as a gift from the universe that directs me towards touching grass, and going swimming. Enjoy your summer, you all! Connect with your local community, if you can.

[–] Kris@feddit.org 15 points 2 days ago

Glad that at least someone sees a positive side of it, because I sure don't... well at least it gives me a bunch of ideas how to avoid such situations in the future 🤷

[–] DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 16 points 2 days ago

thirty minutes later

Okay I touched grass and now I'm bored and itchy

[–] compostgoblin@sh.itjust.works 12 points 2 days ago

Thanks for letting us know! Try not to worry about it too much, it’s all good

[–] PirateFrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com 32 points 2 days ago (9 children)

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!

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[–] Sergio@lemmy.world 19 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Hey fellow slrpnk.net refugees... if you're looking to recreate your list of subscribed communities, here's a good place to start:

click here for a list of communities that are NOT politics, tech, or meme -related.

Most are currently active (except for the ones with a * which were less active last I checked) Sometimes politics, tech or memes sneak in but they're not the focus.

GENERAL DISCUSSION / QUESTIONS

ART / PHOTOS

ANIMALS

COMICS / GRAPHIC NOVELS

ENTERTAINMENT

GENRES / STYLES

HISTORY

INFORMATION / KNOWLEDGE

OTHER

FEDIVERSE

FINDING NEW/GOOD COMMUNITIES ON LEMMY

click here for a list of (mostly non-political) meme communities

MEMES, SOCIAL MEDIA REPOSTS, AND HUMOR

Most of these are currently active. (except for the ones with a * which were less active last I checked). Sometimes these include politics but that's not the sole focus.

(luckily I was posting this to newcomers whenever I had the chance...)

[–] DeathByDenim@lemmy.world 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

You will unfortunately have to get rid of the lemmy.ee links since they are closing down very soon.

https://lemm.ee/post/65824884

[–] Dave@lemmy.nz 4 points 1 day ago

Many of the .ee communities are in the process of migrating, so hopefully the list can be updated with their new homes.

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[–] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 26 points 2 days ago

Thanks for letting us know

[–] khaliso@lemmy.world 7 points 2 days ago

Thanks for the heads up! My Main account is in slrpnk, so I'll set a reminder in an month to switch back. :)

[–] stabby_cicada@lemmy.blahaj.zone 19 points 2 days ago

Shit happens. Thanks for the update 🙂

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