MeFi status when metafilter.com is down January 14, 2025 12:54 PM Subscribe
Does Metafilter have someplace that we can go to check on the health of MeFi itself, or get repair updates, that's NOT hosted at Metafilter itself? Other websites will often have an Twitter account for that. I realize that MeFi has left Twitter, but is there someplace else we can go to check, when MeFi itself goes down?
Last night I found that I couldn't get to Metafilter, ANY of the *.metafilter.com sites, due to an expired SSL cert. Now, I've got an old browser that is about to expire itself so I thought at first that maybe it was my problem, and so I decided to just "step away from the keyboard sir" for the night and voila this morning it's back. So I'm guessing that MeFi did indeed mess up on the cert and it got fixed in a hurry :)
But while I was wondering, I looked around for a Metafilter status account, e.g. on Twitter, that might say something about the outage. I do know that MeFi has status.metafilter.com, and that said everything was fine. Notably, that site is an UNencrypted http site, so would not be affected by a problem with the SSL cert that would take out https sites. So I could see that status :)
MeFi did have a Twitter account at one time, but that was shut down for obvious reasons. Googling led me to a mefi.social Mastodon account which appears to NOT be official, rather a fan account that posts some interesting MeFi stuff, a la the sidebar here.
Does MeFi have a place that's NOT at *.metafilter.com where mods can post repair updates?
Even if this particular outage had nothing to do with MeFi itself (curious how though), it would be a good resource to have for next time. And if it was a known problem, it should have been noted at the status site, but maybe I just happened to encounter it quickly, before mods had a chance to update the status.
Last night I found that I couldn't get to Metafilter, ANY of the *.metafilter.com sites, due to an expired SSL cert. Now, I've got an old browser that is about to expire itself so I thought at first that maybe it was my problem, and so I decided to just "step away from the keyboard sir" for the night and voila this morning it's back. So I'm guessing that MeFi did indeed mess up on the cert and it got fixed in a hurry :)
But while I was wondering, I looked around for a Metafilter status account, e.g. on Twitter, that might say something about the outage. I do know that MeFi has status.metafilter.com, and that said everything was fine. Notably, that site is an UNencrypted http site, so would not be affected by a problem with the SSL cert that would take out https sites. So I could see that status :)
MeFi did have a Twitter account at one time, but that was shut down for obvious reasons. Googling led me to a mefi.social Mastodon account which appears to NOT be official, rather a fan account that posts some interesting MeFi stuff, a la the sidebar here.
Does MeFi have a place that's NOT at *.metafilter.com where mods can post repair updates?
Even if this particular outage had nothing to do with MeFi itself (curious how though), it would be a good resource to have for next time. And if it was a known problem, it should have been noted at the status site, but maybe I just happened to encounter it quickly, before mods had a chance to update the status.
Just as an FYI, mefi.social is a small Mastodon instance run by pronoiac, and most (all?) of the members are MeFites. Very nice folks and a gentle way to get into Mastodon.
posted by briank at 1:20 PM on January 14 [6 favorites]
posted by briank at 1:20 PM on January 14 [6 favorites]
Not really, there is an announcement channel unless
it
failed to go off.
posted by clavdivs at 3:27 PM on January 14
it
failed to go off.
posted by clavdivs at 3:27 PM on January 14
OK, thanks BB! And thanks to Frimble for the quick fix. And thanks to the developers for setting up a new alert for your Slack channel. Another suggestion would be for the status.metafilter.com script to be able to detect that outage, because at the time it said it was "feelin' fine", just like it does now.
posted by intermod at 3:35 PM on January 14 [1 favorite]
posted by intermod at 3:35 PM on January 14 [1 favorite]
I noticed and contact formed when the SSL cert was down last night; I checked and it's a Let's Encrypt cert... They typically email whoever is registered with them (or maybe the admin on the WHOIS record?) when the expiration date is approaching, you might have whoever that may be check to see if that happened (or possibly it's set to an email of someone who no longer is a mod).
posted by axiom at 8:07 PM on January 14 [3 favorites]
posted by axiom at 8:07 PM on January 14 [3 favorites]
Chat should be fixed now
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 5:12 AM on January 15 [1 favorite]
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 5:12 AM on January 15 [1 favorite]
Still better than the couple years in a row when it expired on Christmas Eve.
posted by restless_nomad (retired) at 6:29 AM on January 15 [4 favorites]
posted by restless_nomad (retired) at 6:29 AM on January 15 [4 favorites]
Let's Encrypt's certbot has had some issues with auto-renewing recently, I had to touch it for the first time in literal years the other week because of it. If I hadn't had the email about it, I would've been scratching my head about things suddenly breaking for ages.
posted by Dysk at 8:20 AM on January 15 [2 favorites]
posted by Dysk at 8:20 AM on January 15 [2 favorites]
The developers will be doing some of their magic to make a thingabob that monitors the doohickeys of the site and will send notifications to the mod slack if it detects something went down.
The thingabob will automatically monitor the site and send Slack notifications to the mods and update Bluesky.
posted by kirkaracha (staff) at 12:16 AM on January 16 [1 favorite]
The thingabob will automatically monitor the site and send Slack notifications to the mods and update Bluesky.
posted by kirkaracha (staff) at 12:16 AM on January 16 [1 favorite]
You are not logged in, either login or create an account to post comments
MetaFilter does have a Bluesky account, so we’ll be using that to update things if the site goes down.
The developers will be doing some of their magic to make a thingabob that monitors the doohickeys of the site and will send notifications to the mod slack if it detects something went down.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 1:12 PM on January 14 [5 favorites]