[tor-project] Debian bullseye upgrade of GitLab server expected to cause outages

[Antoine Beaupré]

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

-- 
Antoine Beaupré
torproject.org system administration
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 487 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/attachments/20220525/d2cbecf5/attachment.sig>