Hi folks,
I've just been informed by Linode, our host, that this virtual server is being migrated to new hardware tomorrow, January 18th, at around 6pm GMT. I'm not totally sure of the timezones, but I think that's around lunchtime on the west coast of the USA, it's definitely 2am in China, and presumably around 4-5am in Australia (can't remember how many TZs you guys have).
With a bit of luck and a fair wind, a nice loud creak from the electron injector, and a good swing on the harddisks, we'll be back up and running in around 10 minutes from shutdown.... but, this being IT and not an 80 year old Lister, the old girl might take a bit longer to make black smoke. I'll be around at the time of the reboot, so I'll keep an eye on things & hopefully I can fix it if it all goes titsup.
This downtime is to patch the server to prevent the Meltdown bug from affecting it. More downtime will follow later to patch against Spectre, but it should be less dramatic.
So.... break out your Listers, and be prepared to take a 10 minute smoke break while we wait for the electrons and positrons to do their thing!
Cheers,
Ade.