Spare a thought for Jasper Spaans, who hosts the Linux Kernel Mailing List archive from a single PC that lives in his home. And since things always happen this way the home machine died while he was on holiday.
The archive was therefore unavailable for much of the weekend, although Linux developers could still use mirrors like Indiana University’s effort.
Spaans quickly learned of the outage and he said it was a simple issue, that a brief power outage left the server waiting for a luks – Linux Unified Key Setup – password.
The sad part is that that machine has an initrd with remote ssh access for passing the passphrase (because of a sucky java-based kvm), but I can’t reach the bugger from the outside. A vps + cryptops might be a thing for when this hardware dies though.
— jasper spaans (@spaans) January 10, 2018But once he got home, it became apparent the problem was rather more serious.
Bad news for the fans of https://t.co/MTS96wBH6B : the main board of the server somehow did not survive the outage 🙁
Expect prolonged downtime while I source replacement parts. (Any recommendations for mini-itx server boards? Currently looking at https://t.co/IHGz1wyxeS )
— jasper spaans (@spaans) January 13, 2018The hardware Spaans needed appears to have arrived: in the 30 minutes The Reg worked on this story, lkml.org came back to full life.
Source: Wait, what? The Linux Kernel Mailing List archives lived on ONE PC? One BROKEN PC? • The Register
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