Hi All,
As some of you may have realised, the planned upgrade sort of crashed everything, and we had our longest period of downtime since the site began.
This is partly because I had to go to sleep (thanks to a newborn and a job).
The good news is that the backup process worked! We’ve restored to seconds before the upgrade took the site offline.
The bad news is that federation is likely to be… wonky… for a little while. The site may also go up and down while I undo some of the fixes I tried.
Ultimately the issue came down to the upgrade failing (I am not sure why - will be digging into this now the priority is no longer getting the site up) and then the containers not talking to eachother, so the UI wouldn’t talk to lemmy, and lemmy wouldn’t talk to the database.
I rebuilt the containers, restored the backup, restarted everything, and it’s all come back up (admittedly not perfect right now).
Importantly, I want to issue an apology. This isn’t what I want for Lemmy.zip, and it should’ve been handled way better by myself. I’m always learning but this took way longer than it should’ve, and while I take some solace in the fact the backup process worked and has been proven to work in production, the delay in being able to get this back up is entirely my fault and frankly unacceptable.
I’ll be working to document this outage, the steps it took to get it back up, and some form of repeatable plan so a repair can be replicated in the future if I’m not available.
In terms of upgrading to 0.19.11 - I will have to try again soon as it’s got some security fixes we desperately need to implement.
Thanks
Demigodrick
I will try and reply to each comment - but you’ve all been really kind and that means so much ❤️
If you’re interested, this graph will show you how far behind we are. We should eventually catch up, but things will likely be very delayed for up to 12 hours.
The status page did not work as expected - and I’ll try and link a few more places where I post updates. If you haven’t yet, definitely join the matrix space and you’ll get minute by minute panic updates 🫠
That graph is really kind of neat, but it seems to only be synchronizing with a single instance at a time from what I can tell. I saw the world line has dropped significantly, but the other lines don’t look like they’ve fallen yet.
Yes, the lemmy.world admins kindly manually reset the timer for their instance so it started updating straight away!
If an instance goes down, other instances slowly back off sending retries of activities so not to waste sending them to dead instances.
You can use this tool to see this info. It links lemmy.world but you can search for any instance, and then look up lemmy.zip either under failed or lagging instances. You’ll see on the far right the “next send try” time and date. Looks like a lot will try again around 9pm (although I’m not entirely sure on the timezone there) - so over the next few hours instances will send another try, see that lemmy.zip is back up, and then start federation with us again :)
It’s cool to see that there’s logic built-in that keeps instances from sending Federation requests to dead instances. But when an instance comes back online, they will re-synchronize themselves. An instance may drop out of the Federation, but when it comes back, it will get everything it missed. Eventually.
I’ve been there. But it is my honor to bestow upon you this award to commemorate the accomplishment
Honestly the blast radius is pretty small compared to Cloudstruck
That’s amazing, thank you. I might actually print that out and frame it 🤣
Ah yes. I still wear my 25 year old “deleted a prod database” badge with honor
It’s a bittersweet honour to have. My personal fail was being too cocky updating a ‘handful’ of product descriptions.
(15398 rows(s) affected)
Chiil, you do a great job managing this. There is no need to blame that way yourself.
Get some rest, enjoy first stages of parenting and take your time updating.
Thanks a lot for lemmy.zip and take care of yourself.
Things gotta fuck up sometimes, tis how we figure shit out and learn things! You got this.
Definitely a learning experience 😅
Thank you for this post. Don’t be so harsh on yourself, everyone can make a mistake!
Good to see Lemmy.zip back up!
Thanks for all your hard work. We missed .zip while it was gone.
Thank you! Hopefully it stays back now!
No worries! Make sure you’re getting enough rest!
Thank you! Gonna sleep a lot better tonight knowing the site is working again 😅
Importantly, I want to issue an apology
Way I see it, family and mental health always comes before internet randos. Thanks for working hard for everyone.
Lots of Internet randos have been very nice and supportive, so I feel a debt to the community to make this place the best it can be.
But thank you ❤️
Thank you for the transparent announcement, and don’t sweat it!
Thank you, appreciate that!
thanks for the effort and also explanation
Hey, no worries, an explanation is the least I can do!
Thanks for the update.
I was a bit worried for your mental health as the hours of downtime continued :)
Awesome that the backup restore procedure work that well.
One thing I have been wondering is, why status.lemmy.zip stayed all green during all of this.
I was a little worried that he got arrested by the UK POLICE due to the online privacy act
😆 I heard a siren the other day and thought “oh shit, they’ve found me!”
Something definitely went wrong with the status page - going to find a different solution!
Because it was technically working, it’s just that “UI wouldn’t talk to lemmy, and lemmy wouldn’t talk to the database”. Soo they were operating, but not communicating to each other.
Most of the day, when I was loading the front page lemmy.zip I got 502 bad gateway, so I was thinking something like adding a check of if the page load with the external status tool.
You can join the Matrix server https://matrix.to/#/#lemmy.zip:matrix.org for real time updates.
I was using https://www.lemmy-status.org/endpoints/_lemmy-zip to check
We so back
Dude, keeping this running with a job and a newborn? You’re headed for sainthood.
If you don’t have one, you could start an out of band chat during updates, just in case you need some eyes on things or just some moral support. I’m sure we have at least a few subject matter experts around if you can stand us :)
Please do join the matrix chat, always posting live updates of what’s happening and experience is always welcome there!
You can join the Matrix server https://matrix.to/#/#lemmy.zip:matrix.org
Thanks for the update! I figured it must have had something to do with the baby and the busy life + the update not working as expected, so I was patient.
After 12hrs or so I did go on mastodon to look for an update (just a ‘everything crashed, working on the backup’ kinda message) so if this ever happens again that might be an idea?
Thanks for working so hard on getting everything back up and don’t forget to rest!
Matrix is deffo the best place to get live updates but I’ll be adding updates to mastodon and to the status page, when I find a working replacement!
You can join the Matrix server https://matrix.to/#/#lemmy.zip:matrix.org
Thanks! I have no idea what matrix is though, is it like an open source / decentralized discord?
Bascially yes.
I’ve been trying to get away from matrix since it leaks metadata like a sieve. And I’ve been using SimpleX instead. Plus, it’s easier to manage the E2E keys and not fuck up and lose access to your messages.
Don’t worry. Newborn is a trump card, but even without it you literally are a volunteer.
Anyone complaining about you volunteering your time esp with a newborn, is not a parent…but ignoring that you’re doing this for free. Thanks for your time, effort, and just happy it’s back up :).
Social media that can go down for a day or two is way better than a shit hole of advertising and manipulation that is Facebook, reddit, and all the rest.
