Possible reboot sometime soon. Let me know if there are performance issues.

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emk
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Possible reboot sometime soon. Let me know if there are performance issues.

Postby emk » Wed Jan 03, 2018 10:29 pm

There's a huge security vulnerability in most modern processors. Google has posted some details here, but the full announcement will probably wait for tomorrow.

What this means for the forum:

  1. If the server hasn't been rebooted yet, it may be rebooted soon. This will mean perhaps 5 minutes of downtime, give or take.
  2. After rebooting, we may see a performance hit. This might be anywhere from 2% to 30%, according to various reports about what has happened to other systems.
  3. I think we'll still be OK on performance, but if we're not, please let me know and we can look into (another) server upgrade if we need one.
More details when they become public. Thank you for your patience, and our apologies for this disruption!

Update: Geeky details here. New York Times here.
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Re: Possible reboot sometime soon. Let me know if there are performance issues.

Postby Serpent » Thu Jan 04, 2018 4:24 am

I'm geeky but not in that highly specific way, and I found this quick explanation helpful :D (contains profanity)
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Re: Possible reboot sometime soon. Let me know if there are performance issues.

Postby dampingwire » Fri Jan 05, 2018 11:13 pm

emk wrote:There's a huge security vulnerability in most modern processors.


I'm just curious ...

Are you saying that the forum VM needs a reboot for the patches (which is in the hands of the forum admins) or that the VM host needs a reboot (which is down to the hosting provider)?

I can understand the latter, as the bugs would allow us to steal info from the VM next door (and vice versa), but then I'd expect our VM to be switched to hardware that has already rebooted and so we should see little downtime.

If it's the former, why does the forum VM need a reboot? Meltdown and Spectre only let anyone on the VM read anything else on the VM (and other VMs on the same hardware, but this VM can't fix that), but the only thing worth stealing would be everyone's details and passwords, but since the only people on the VM are admins who have all that anyway ...

I'm missing something.
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