Hello!

In order to conserve resources and prevent bot-net hijacking, cloud-vps users have a few maintenance responsibilities. This spring two of these duties have come due: an easy one and a hard one. Tl;dr: visit https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/News/Cloud_VPS_2024_Purge, claim your projects, and replace any hosts still running Debian Buster.

-- #1: Claim your projects --

This one is easy. Please visit the following wiki page and make a small edit in your project(s) section, indicating whether you are or aren't still using your project:

https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/News/Cloud_VPS_2024_Purge

this serves a couple of purposes. It allows us to identify and shut down abandoned or no-longer-useful projects, it provides us with some updated info about who cares about a given project (often useful for future contact purposes) and it increases visibility into projects that are used but unmaintained.

Regarding that last item: if you know that you depend on a project but are not an admin or member of that project, please make a note of that on the above page as well!

-- #2: Replace Debian Buster --

This one may require some work. Long term support for the Debian Buster OS release is quickly running out (ending June 30), so VMs running Buster need to be replaced with hosts running a new Debian version. You may or may not be responsible for Buster instances; you can see a break down of remaining Buster hosts on either of these pages:

https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/News/Cloud_VPS_2024_Purge (you should be visiting that page anyway, because of item 1)

https://os-deprecation.toolforge.org/

More details about this process can be found here:

https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/News/Buster_deprecation

Typically in-place upgrades of VMs don't work all that well, so my advice is to start fresh with a new server running Bookworm and to migrate workloads to the new host. I've found Cinder volumes to be a big help in this process; once all of  your persistent data and config is in a detachable volume it's fairly straightforward to move and will make future upgrades that much easier.

WMCS staff will be standing by to help with any quota changes you might need to help with this move; you can open a quota request ticket at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/view/2880/ -- and, as always, we'll do our best to support you on IRC and on the cloud mailing list.

Thank you for your support and attention!

-Andrew + the WMCS team