Post from NFO: -
We are planning to reboot the machine hosting your VDS at approximately 1:30am Central Time on December 15, in order to apply critical platform updates that address serious vulnerabilities. We are also scheduling a backup maintenance window for the next day at the same time; this backup will be used if there are problems on the first day (such as an issue with packaging the update, or last-minute bugs that are found in the code) such that we have to try again.
We have generally avoided the need for reboots over the last several years by invisibly using livepatches to update running code. However, the new security patches (and microcode updates that also need to be applied) cannot be applied to a running system.
For the reboot, your VDS will need to be shut down for approximately 15-60 minutes. We will attempt to gracefully shut it down on our end through Xen, but on occasion this doesn't work perfectly, so you may consider turning off applications that might write to disk before the maintenance event. If you are running Windows 2012 R2 or later, please also note your VDS may need additional reboots to work properly, due to a bug within Xen related to how it boots up (that only occurs during bootup) -- our system will attempt to detect when this is the case and perform the extra reboot operations, but we recommend checking afterward yourself, as well.
While we don't expect any problems related to the reboot of your machine, most machines here have not been rebooted in over a year, and there is always a remote possibility that hardware could fail as a result of the reboot. We recommend performing an extra external backup of irreplaceable files today, just to be completely safe.
