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An Incident Worth Noticing: Linux Kernel Mailing List Website Goes Down for Days

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At a time when the tech world has been rocked by Meltdown and Spectre bugs in CPU, a Linux Kernel Mailing List website goes down for several days.

Speculation: it must be somehow related to that Meltdown bug.

Reality: the website goes down because it is hosted on a home server that suffered a power outage and needed the password to boot. Problem was that owner Jasper was on vacation when this incident happened.

Just to clarify, lkml.org, one of the many websites that host the Linux Kernel Mailing List archive. It is not the official archive.

lkml.org is managed by Jasper Spanns in the Netherlands. He hosts it on a personal computer at his home.

When he was on vacation last week, his washing machine malfunctioned and caused a power outage on 9-10 January. And thus the system that hosts needed to enter LUKS passphrase. Jasper revealed the backstory on Twitter:

It was natural that people would find it amusing that a website as popular as lkml.org is self-hosted at someone’s home.

But hey! when it comes to the community, Linux enthusiasts always lend a helping hand. Several people offered their help to host the servers on a better infrastructure.

Server hosting company Liquid Web also jumped in for the sake of Linux community.

Heck! Someone even tagged Elon Musk to help Jasper and lkml.org servers.

Jasper returned on Saturday evening and is in process of moving the servers to a reliable Virtual Private Server.

At present, this is the message you’ll see on lkml.org:

What started out as a power outage while I was on vacation (leading to the computer hosting the backend of this site being unable to boot) became a larger issue as the mainboard in that computer appears to be broken.

Not wanting to let you wait for a spare part to arrive, I’m currently (while being assisted by our cat Flits) busy copying over all data to a VPS, and getting things working from there.

Linux Kernel Mailing List website goes down

The website should be up and running soon.

Before someone starts outraging, no, this is not a criticism of Jasper. His contribution to the Linux community is always appreciable.

However, this amusing incident reminds us that critical infrastructure should not be hosted in a private home. Self-hosting was a thing in the 90’s but in 2018, you have the option of cloud and VPS servers and it doesn’t cost much.

What do you think? Is it still okay to host web servers at home or not? What are your views on it?

P.S. Are you okay to have these BuzzFeed style stories from time to time? Or should we stick to the ‘real stuff’?


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  • 1. yes, hosting at home is completely ok..
    My own website is only hosted for convenience but will soon host the larger files at home. My website is hardly critical to any one.. wich lead me to ..
    2. the website mentioned is a “Mailing List archive. It is not the official archive” .. so ..
    The people to whom information on mailing list is/may be critical hardly rely on japer’s site (only). The proly will get (critical) the info by other means ..
    Again .. It’s an archive and is not the official one.

    Reply

  • I think it’s fine to run the server from home. It doesn’t matter where it is located, stuff happens.
    And backup/failover can be supplied from there to the extent deemed needed for the service provided.
    There are advantages to running from home and advantages to running from the cloud.

    Reply

  • “Are you okay to have these BuzzFeed style stories from time to time? Or should we stick to the ‘real stuff’?”

    A-OK, provided it’s “from time to time.”

    Reply
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