Comment on Slrpnk.net outage
wit@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I am a slrpnk user. Oh well, shit happens. What makes me a bit sad was that a few months (?) ago something happened. Slrpnk.net was down for a a day or two? Don’t remember. What I do remember is asking if there was intention of adding a second admin and 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.
Kris@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
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.
wit@lemmy.world 2 weeks 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.
PirateFrog@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
I see in your edit that you confused us for a different instance, but I want to mention regardless that Slrpnk.net has 3 active admins, it’s not just poVoq (Kris).
Kris@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
We have been very transparent about that and documented that in the wiki which is linked in the sidebar. But it seems few people ever read the Wiki and having it integrated like it is with Piefed would probably help.
I agree that more admins with remote access would be good to have, and we have been working towards adding more (there are already more than one, who are not directly involved with slrpnk, but rather the mother project f-hub.org), but physical access will always be limited by the location (Azores) unless we move to an entirely different data-center (which in turn would make it hard for me to access the physical servers).
wit@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Oh ya. I knew about that, and I am fine with that. Though I think having it behind a link is bad UI. People will not read it haha… It should be presented on account creation, in my opinion. Just 1 sentence “This instance is ran on private hardware and may suffer some down time here and there” would suffice.