This is a past/expired downtime notification. The downtimes specified below have been completed, and remarks/results are given below as well.

Unless otherwise noted, all dates and times are given in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), with time in 24-hour notation.

The Xen development team has released several highly-critical and so far undisclosed Xen Security Advisories (XSAs), and as such, Linode (LizardNet’s provider) will be performing emergency maintenance on all systems. The emergency maintenance does involve briefly shutting down all systems in a rolling fashion before the scheduled disclosure date of 29 October 2015. (For more information, visit Linode’s status blog here.)

Update: The XSAs have been disclosed by the Xen Security team.  The XSA in question that prompted all this seems to be XSA-148 (also known as CVE-2015-7835; explanatory commentary from the QubesOS folks).

The following servers and services will experience downtime as a result of this:

phazon.fastlizard4.org

Date and time of downtime start: 06:00 Tuesday 20 October 2015 UTC (convert to other timezones)

Duration of downtime: Expected between 30 minutes and 1 hour, but up to 2 hours is possible

Status: Completed with no issues!

Partial list of services affected:

• LizardWiki
• LizardNet OTRS (emails sent to OTRS during the downtime will be delivered after the downtime concludes)
• LizardNet Continuous Integration (Jenkins) (Gerrit will not be able to trigger any jobs during the downtime, and they will not be run after the downtime concludes)
• LizardNet Minecraft dynamic web maps
• LizardIRC server emerald.lizardirc.org
• LizardIRC’s website
• LizardMail services on phazon.fastlizard4.org (emails sent to phazon.fastlizard4.org users during the downtime will be delivered after the downtime concludes)

Though the following servers are affected by the XSAs, I will instead be upgrading them to KVM before their scheduled XSA patching windows. They will only experience a single downtime, however, the downtime window could be longer if the upgrade from Xen to KVM causes any problems. These servers will also, after the KVM upgrades, not be affected by future XSAs.

ridley.fastlizard4.org

Date and time of downtime start: 05:00 Wednesday 21 October 2015 UTC (convert to other timezones)

Duration of downtime: Most likely around one hour, though could be longer if complications arise during the Xen -> KVM upgrade

Status: Completed with no issues!

Partial list of services affected:

• LizardWiki
• Star Trek Games wiki
• Wikitroid Skintest
• LizardNet Code Review (Gerrit)
• LizardNet Code Explorer (Gitblit)
• LizardVPN
• LizardNet Minecraft servers s1, c1, and c2
• LizardNet’s Teamspeak3 server
• Rav3nZNC
• LizardIRC server diamond.lizardirc.org
• LizardIRC’s website
• LizardMail services on ridley.fastlizard4.org (emails sent to fastlizard4.org users during the downtime will be delivered after the downtime concludes)

minecraft1.fastlizard4.org

Date and time of downtime start: 05:00 Saturday 24 October 2015 UTC (convert to other timezones)

Duration of downtime: Most likely around one hour, though could be longer if complications arise during the Xen -> KVM upgrade

Status: Completed with no issues!

Services affected:

• LizardNet Minecraft servers s2, m1, and m2

I apologize for the short notice on which I’m scheduling these downtimes. Though I normally aim to announce at least a week in advance, the critical nature of the XSAs requires immediate attention (indeed, I didn’t receive the reboot schedule from Linode until only shortly before this writing).