So this site has been down since at least July 9, 2019 (according to my email). And the reasons were pretty simple – and dumb. This post is going to be a sort of post-mortem on why it failed and what the fixes were. And (hopefully) it’ll include some lessons learned.

About the Site

This site runs on apache2 on a debian-stable server. The underlying site is written in Django. The entire site is supposed to be self-maintaining. This happens via a combination of Debian’s unattentded-upgrades capabilities and a homebrew django-autoupdate script. Django, in turn, is backed by a MySQL database.

In order to be able to cleanly attempt upgrades,

So What Happened?

Simply put, Debian Buster released (on July 6, 2019) and I wasn’t prepared. This release upgraded python. Normally that’s not a big issue. Except that I had hard-coded the python version in the site configuration file:

<IfModule mod_ssl.c>  
    <VirtualHost *:443>  
        ServerName …