/Docs

How to Reboot

The whole site runs on a single DreamHost VPS (the database is on a separate DreamHost machine and is not affected by a reboot). A reboot takes about a minute, during which the website, the apps, and chat are unavailable. The uptime monitor will notice and may send an alert; that is expected.

Before you reboot

Most problems do not need a reboot. Try these first, in order:

  1. Open https://www.hackleyclubz.org/uptime.php. If it says success, the server itself is fine and the problem is somewhere more specific.
  2. If chat, images, or push notifications are the only things broken, use Admin → Maintenance → Restart Services in the site’s admin area. Each background service can be restarted on its own from there.

Reboot when the site does not respond at all, SSH is unresponsive or very slow, or a service restart from the admin page does not help.

Option 1: from the DreamHost panel

This works even when the server is completely unresponsive.

  1. Log in to the DreamHost panel.
  2. Go to the VPS section and find the Hackley Clubz server in the list.
  3. Click the triple-dot menu (⋯) next to the server.
  4. Choose Reboot and confirm.

The panel shows the server’s status while it restarts. Give it a minute or two before checking.

Option 2: over SSH

If you can still log in, this is the gentler route because the operating system gets to shut things down cleanly:

ssh lillytech@hackleyclubz.org
sudo reboot

Your SSH session will drop. Wait a minute and log back in.

After the reboot

Everything is configured to start on boot, so no manual steps should be needed. Confirm it worked:

  1. https://www.hackleyclubz.org/uptime.php shows success : ....
  2. The login page loads at https://www.hackleyclubz.org.
  3. Admin → Maintenance → Restart Services shows every service as RUNNING. (Over SSH, the same picture comes from sctl status.)
  4. Open a chat thread and post a message; it should appear without a page refresh.
  5. If the uptime monitor sent a “down” alert, it should now send the matching “up” alert.

If a service is not running after the reboot, restart it from the admin page. If the server does not come back at all, follow the recovery runbook in the source repository (docs/how_to_recover_from_backup_from_machine_failure.txt).