[Labs-announce] REMINDER: Ubuntu Precise instances on Labs will be shut down at the end of March

[Andrew Bogott]

This is a periodic reminder about the upcoming deprecation of Ubuntu 
Precise.  Details below, with a list of affected instances at the very 
bottom.

If you are affected by this issue, please update 
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T143349 with details about your plans.

Thank you!

---

On March 31st, 2017, all Precise instances running on Labs will be shut 
down.

In April, Ubuntu 12.04 Precise will reach its official End of Life. That 
means no more security upgrades, so after that date servers and VMs 
running Precise will no longer be welcome on Wikimedia infrastructure.

Toollabs users are already on notice that web services and tools need to 
be upgraded to run on Trusty, Jessie, or Kubernetes hosts. Outside of 
Toollabs, there are still 26 Precise instances running on Labs, listed 
below.

If you are responsible for any of these VMs, please begin migrating your 
work to new instances as soon as possible.  Due to security concerns, 
this is a hard deadline -- instances WILL be shut down on March 31st, 
and their data destroyed a few weeks later.  The Labs team will be 
dedicating quite a bit of time to assisting with this migration in the 
coming months, so don't hesitate to ask for help if you run into trouble 
or the migration process is unclear.  Do start thinking about this now 
so you don't get lost in a stampede of support requests in March.

If possible you'll want to migrate to instances running Debian Jessie. 
Trusty will sunset in 2019 but support for Jessie (both from the WMF and 
from upstream maintainers) is likely to continue well after that.

---

Here are all the instances subject to shutdown:

account-creation-assistance: accounts-db2
analytics: limn1
bots: wm-bot
contributors: contributors-metrics
editor-engagement: docs
editor-engagement: mwui
huggle: huggle
maps: maps-tiles1
mediahandler-tests: mediahandler-tests-static
openstack: labs-vmbuilder-precise
otrs: otrs-test2
signwriting: signwriting-ase-wiki
snuggle: snuggle-en
social-tools: social-tools1
sugarcrm: officetools
utrs: utrs-primary
visualeditor: towtruck
wikidata-dev: wikidata-wdq-mm
wikisource-dev: wikisource-dev
wikisource-tools: wsexport
wikistream: wikistream-web
wildcat: dannyb-large
wildcat: dannyb-test
wildcat: dannyb
wlmjudging: wlm-mysql-master
wlmjudging: wlm-apache1