[bitfolk] Reminder: Reboots will be necessary to address security issues, early hours 17/18/19 October

Hi, A reminder that maintenance is scheduled for the early hours (UK time) of 17, 18 and 19 October. Irritatingly, this may end up having to be postponed. One of the patches has problems and the vendor is still working on that. If they come up with something in the next few hours I will still have time to test it appropriately, but if they don't then I won't and we'll have to postpone this maintenance for one week. Please assume it is going ahead unless you are notified otherwise. You should have all received a direct email telling you the hour long maintenance window that each of your VMs is in. If you can't find it please check your spam folders etc; it was sent on 7 October. If you still can't find it, work out which host machine you're on¹, and then the maintenance windows are: elephant 2020-10-17 00:00 hen 2020-10-18 02:00 hobgoblin 2020-10-18 01:00 jack 2020-10-19 00:00 leffe 2020-10-19 01;00 macallan 2020-10-17 02:00 paradox 2020-10-18 00:00 snaps 2020-10-19 02:00 talisker 2020-10-17 03:00 These times are all in UTC so add 1 hour for UK time (BST). Cheers, Andy ¹ This is listed on https://panel.bitfolk.com/ and is also evident from resolving <accountname>.console.bitfolk.com in DNS, e.g.: $ host ruminant.console.bitfolk.com ruminant.console.bitfolk.com is an alias for console.leffe.bitfolk.com. console.leffe.bitfolk.com is an alias for leffe.bitfolk.com. leffe.bitfolk.com has address 85.119.80.22 leffe.bitfolk.com has IPv6 address 2001:ba8:0:1f1::d ----- Forwarded message from Andy Smith &lt;andy(a)bitfolk.com&gt; ----- Date: Wed, 7 Oct 2020 09:20:29 +0000 From: Andy Smith &lt;andy(a)bitfolk.com&gt; To: announce(a)lists.bitfolk.com Subject: [bitfolk] Reboots will be necessary to address security issues, probably early hours 17/18/19 October User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.23 (2014-03-12) Reply-To: users(a)lists.bitfolk.com Hello, Unfortunately - and annoyingly only a month since the last lot - some serious security bugs have been discovered in the Xen hypervisor and fixes for these have now been pre-disclosed, with an embargo that ends at 1200Z on 20 October 2020. As a result we will need to apply these fixes and reboot everything before that time. We are likely to do this in the early hours of the morning UK time, on 17, 18 and 19 October. In the next few days individual emails will be sent out confirming to you which hour long maintenance window your services are in. The times will be in UTC; please note that UK is currently observing daylight savings and as such is currently at UTC+1. We expect the work to take between 15 and 30 minutes per bare metal host. If you have opted in to suspend and restore¹ then your VM will be suspended to storage and restored again after the host it is on is rebooted. Otherwise your VM will be cleanly shut down and booted again later. If you cannot tolerate the downtime then please contact support(a)bitfolk.com. We may be able to migrate² you to already-patched hardware before the regular maintenance starts. You can expect a few tens of seconds of pausing in that case. This process uses suspend&restore so has the same caveats. It is disappointing to have another round of security reboots 28 days after the last lot, though before that there was a gap of about 330 days. Still, as there are security implications we have no choice in the matter. Cheers, Andy ¹ https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Suspend_and_restore ² https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Suspend_and_restore#Migration -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting ----- End forwarded message ----- _______________________________________________ announce mailing list announce(a)lists.bitfolk.com https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/announce