Well here's for an interesting start to the new year. As some of you who are into tech may already know, the computer world was rocked a few days ago with the revelation that most machines are affected by vulnerabilities they're calling Meltdown and Spectre. Every server provider is rushing to patch these issues and ours is no exception. What's particularly annoying for us though is that we only get one day's notice for each of our servers before they are forcefully shut down and patched and it has to happen AGAIN for each machine at another unspecified future date. We have a lot of servers and 24 hours just doesn't give me a lot of time to shift things around so that AFF and RPR don't get down times. Unfortunately, we're going to have to have a few minutes of down time here and there since I can't manually choose when to patch each server and these forced shut downs can affect several machines at the same time (wtf server provider).

This situation shouldn't last too much longer and I'll do my best to reduce site outages by routing around downed machines and spinning up new ones. I've also been looking at moving on to higher tier server providers who seemed to have figured out how to roll out patches without forcefully shutting machines down.

In the meantime, I'll continue to keep an eye out on notices for which servers will be scheduled for maintenance next and I'll try to route around those ahead of schedule to keep the site up. We'll see how it goes.