Tildes will be down for most of this weekend

I'm going to be taking the site down this weekend to do some upgrades and changes to various systems it runs on. I'm planning to start the downtime somewhere around noon on Saturday, and have it running again on Sunday evening (vague times, in a vague North American timezone).

If you're interested in the details, the main reason is to switch operating systems from Ubuntu to Debian. The easiest and safest way to do this is by just setting up a new server and moving the site over, so I'll also be taking the opportunity to switch to a different physical server. Tildes has been running for 3 years now, so I'll be able to rent a new server that's some combination of faster and cheaper (not that we're getting anywhere close to the limits on this server, but I might as well).

Since I was having to review and adjust the whole server setup as part of switching OSes, I also decided to switch configuration-management systems from SaltStack to Ansible. Salt had a major vulnerability last year that compromised thousands of servers, and Tildes really only avoided being affected through the luck of using it in a non-vulnerable way. I've been intending to switch away from it ever since.

And since the site will be down anyway, I'll also be doing some upgrades and changes that are difficult to do without downtime, including upgrading PostgreSQL, Redis, and Python to their newest versions and making some changes to their setups.

So overall, this turned into a large project, and unfortunately it's one of those wonderful development projects where you do a ton of work and if everything goes well, nobody can even notice any difference from the way it was before. It also would have been possible to do all of this with only minimal downtime, but it would have required a lot more prep work and would be more stressful, so I'm just going to do it the easy way and take my time. If you're interested in doing a Screenless Day, maybe this could be a good time to do it!