As email in profile is an optional feature on our instance about 50% of the userbase opted to not share one so we would only reach some people. But yes, getting spam filtered would be another problem of mass-mailing.

But I found a way to put up a simple html error page and will add this later to inform our members and link to this thread.

We have a small write up about the hardware on our wiki, but it is also down right now.

I think we will share a post-mortem write up of the actual improvements we will do to avoid this in the future.

One thing I will definitly do is to add a KVM remote management console to one of our server boards and move the main firewall into a VM with hardware passthrough of the NICs (this was anyways planned for a 10gbit network upgrade for the second half of 2025). This way I should be able to reboot and even reinstall the main ingress point remotely, so that only the fiber gateway remains as a failure point that requires physical access.

Glad that at least someone sees a positive side of it, because I sure don’t… well at least it gives me a bunch of ideas how to avoid such situations in the future 🤷

Thanks, I am trying, but it really is quite annoying to lose access like that.

Sort of yes. It is a homelab a few people have access to, but currently they are all either on holiday or on extended work related travel. It seemed like an acceptable risk as everything worked smoothly for years.

Yeah I had plans to set up something like that, but always other priorities and in this specific case I could maybe access other internal servers but i would need KVM access to reboot the firewall or some other way to cut physical power. And exfiltrating hundreds of GBs of lemmy database wouldn’t work over such a small pipe either.

The feddit.de admin disappeared on a work trip to Japan. At least that is the official story.

Well, on the plus side lots of lessons learned and I think I might move at least the xmpp server to an external vps to have a backup communication channel.

We have backup admins, but this seems to be an unexpected hardware issue, and physical access to the servers is more restricted.

Yeah, but at least I have not disappeared yet 😅

Yeah, I know. Complete Murphy’s law situation.