What’s happening?
feddit.uk will be down for maintainence between 19:00 and 21:00 UTC (GMT in old money) on Saturday the 27th of January.
We are aiming to move the site between hosts, and restore missing images.
How long do you expect it to take?
The target time is 1 hour. The window is 2 hours. That’s enough time for about 1 season of Peep Show, if you’re bored.
What is the rollback plan?
If we’re not happy with things by 20:30, we will bring the site up in it’s previous state, and schedule a longer window in the future. We’ll let you know if/when the decision is made.
Where can I see status updates?
We have a public channel on Matrix for people who wish to keep up with the status. It’s part of the feddit.uk Matrix space which is there as a fallback in case of any downtime and to provide end-to-end encrypted communication where required.
edit: there is now a WhatsApp channel.
Why are you doing this?
As previously discussed in here, it’s been quite the journey but, in summary: Tom, who set up the instance and was the only Admin, went AWOL. GreatAlbatross and I contacted him offering to take over and Tom made us Admins but we didn’t have any access to the server, so we were limited in what we could do.
The situation got increasingly problematic and plans were drawn up to take over the whole running of the site or to start a new one from scratch. It took a while but just as we were about to pull the trigger on the new instance Tom gave us access. GA is now in charge of the domain and I have overall responsibility for the new server.
The site has been suffering outages because the size of the image folders ate up all the available space and Tom removed the first image folder (why various graphics are still missing). That made moving the site to a new hosting plan more urgent and we’ve been working away in the background to get to the point that we were in a position to start the process. Hence the downtime.
We’d like to thank everyone for their patience and enthusiasm - it has helped carry us through what hasn’t been a straightforward process.
I have more questions
There will be more information after the move about how we are going to move forward with feddit.uk to ensure it will thrive for as long as people want it. However, if there’s anything that is unclear about current events then fire away in the comments below.
Good luck team. I’ve been waiting for this day so I can create new banners for [email protected].
Does that mean all missing avatars and icons have been there all along but just been disabled? Will that get repopulated from other servers? Just curious.
P.S. I like the gateway message. Nice touch.
Thanks! I was having a ponder on what the site “was”. And thinking of it as a gateway, with a some social spaces too, felt right.
Kinda early web style, perhaps?
The first folder of images (which held a lot of early, core graphics) was zipped up and removed from the server.
I don’t want to guarantee anything until we can see that everything has worked, but that folder is currently reintegrated into the new server. It may be caches need to ge cleared or something needs the delicate technical equivalent of a swift kick but all graphics should work within a day or so (or immediately for some people, with luck).
We’ll be able to update everyone on this tomorrow if the move has been successful, so if caches need clearing for some folks they’ll know pretty quickly.