No Stupid Questions

They posted an update here.
https://lemmy.world/post/53472780/26479377

poVoq here. I am starting to think I am cursed, because everything works fine (or is at least fixable with a remote server restart) until the second I go on a longer business trip and can’t easily access the hardware.

Remote access is mostly lost, but I was able to triangulate the issue and of course it is something I had on my list of potential issues, but as a low priority item 🫠 At least it isn’t the same problem again as in 2025.

What exactly triggered the issue is unclear though. I was still able to access the reverse-proxy server yesterday (shortly before it went down) and tried to do some updates for that php security problem in a VM that runs on the same machine. I thought I had those covered, but there is a slight chance that it is related and someone chained another exploit to escape the VM.

Anyways, it looks like the realistic / not overly optimistic scenario is that the server will stay down until christmas. I did have someone who could restart the servers on site until this summer, but they had to relocate to mainland Portugal for job reasons (tourism sector) and so they will also only return for christmas.

So yeah, not great at all, and I will have to think more seriously about how compatible this kind of self-hosting is with my current job, which limits my access to the servers for a few weeks at least once a year. It was easier during the pandemic times when I started all this, as deployments were shorter and more seldom back then.

Here's an update from the admin. They say it might stay down until Christmas.

AFAIU https://slrpnk.net/ is hosted on unique, solar-powered hardware and there was something challenging about its physical location, too.

And short downtimes were to be expected anyhow.

But this is clearly something else; I read the admin's explanation, and going to the site returns this:

This website is currently offline due to an hardware issue that can't be resolved quickly.

It is possible that it will only be restored in December 2026. Sorry.

if anyone’s got a hot tip on how to see my posts there that’s great

so... I'm not an expert, but I think if you go to the basic lemmy search function on lemmy instance A, you can search by user on lemmy instance B. the search field requires some text but you can put a single space there. That'll give you all the posts/comments that federated from instance A to instance B.

For example, I have an account on slrpnk.net that I don't use any more, but on lemmy.world I can search for it thusly:

https://lemmy.world/search?q=+&type=All&listingType=All&creatorId=10734489&page=1&sort=TopAll&titleOnly=false

Images won't be available (bc slrpnk.net is down and the images are hosted there) but all the posts and comments should be visible -- if the community was being federated to lemmy.world.

No announcements I can find.

But, sometimes instances will go down temporarily due to things happening faster than admins can give any warning. And, if they don't have accounts elsewhere, they might not bother to make one just you announce afterwards.

Normally, I'd say to check and see if your instance defederated from them, but that's such a solid instance, it would be really weird for anyone to defed from them.

Wouldn't count them out. Just recently, literature.cafe went down for a couple of days. Sh.itjust.works has had to block app access while setting up protections from bots. Similar stuff happens. An update might break something, or what have you.

How long has it been down? It it's been just a few days, then maybe give it a while.