The main GitLab server (`gitlab-02`) will be upgraded on Monday (2022-05-30) at 1700UTC. That is equivalent to 10:00 US/Pacific, 14:00 America/Montevideo, 13:00 US/Eastern, 17:00 UTC, 19:00 Europe/Paris, 2022-05-31 (next day) 05:00 Pacific/Auckland.
The upgrade should take about two hours but could extend further during the day if regressions are found. GitLab will be partially unavailable during that time: it may be on and off for extended periods of time and it's better to assume it will be completely unavailable for the day.
This is part of the planned Debian bullseye upgrade announced in [TPA-RFC-20][]. The GitLab server is part of the [second batch][] of servers being upgraded.
[TPA-RFC-20]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/40662
The date was chosen because it is a holiday in the USA and the time was chosen to be near the end of the day in Europe, to minimise the impact on everyone.
Feel free to inspect the [upgrade procedure][] for more details. As a special precaution for this server, a full backup will be taken before the upgrade, and filesystem snapshots will be tested to see if they can be used as a recovery.
[upgrade procedure]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/wikis/howto/upgrades/bullseye/
Therefore, it is preferable to minimise the use of the server during the day, even if it is available, because it's possible we will have to restore everything from backups, which could wipe data. A warning will be posted on the site during the procedure to warn about this eventuality.
This operation will be led by TPA, and feedback is welcome in the [second batch][] ticket.
[second batch]: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/issues/40692