Wednesday, August 19, 2026
Transparency Report #014: PHYTWO (Aedon) OS Hypervisor Upgrade Preparation
What are Transparency Reports?
As a community‑operated and governed virtual internet exchange, FurrIX maintains
a commitment to open and honest communication with its members. From time to
time, operational work may occur that affects the exchange or its supporting infrastructure.
When this happens, the FurrIX operations team publishes a transparency report to
ensure all members remain informed. As a hobbyist‑rooted vIX, we aim to keep
communication clear, accessible and practical to the best of our ability.
What Happened
As a small team of volunteers, we pour a lot of free time into maintaining the network’s
engine PHYONE- which leaves our secondary server in need of a little TLC that has gotten
a bit long in the tooth.
Our PHYTWO server (Aedon) is overdue for major updates across its entire stack:
- Debian base OS
- Proxmox VE (PVE)
- Proxmox Backup Server (PBS)
These components are now far enough out of date that routine upgrades carry a
higher‑than‑normal risk of failure. To keep the exchange stable, we’re preparing for
both the best‑case and worst‑case outcomes.
Planned Work
We will be attempting a full upgrade of Aedon’s base OS and PVE environment. If everything
doesn’t explode on us, this will be a straightforward process and PHYTWO will return to service
with current software and no major changes. However, because this host is central to our
control‑plane and monitoring stack, we are staging for the possibility that the upgrade may fail
or leave the system in an unrecoverable state.
Pre‑Upgrade Safeguards
To protect the exchange and ensure continuity of essential services, we are taking the
following steps:
- Temporarily suspending NS2 service
NS2 will be offline during the upgrade window to avoid inconsistent state or partial failure scenarios.
- Backing up critical VMs to PHYONE
Any virtual machines required for day‑to‑day operation will be migrated or backed up to PHYONE.
This ensures we can continue running the vIX even if PHYTWO becomes unavailable.
- Preparing for a full rebuild
If the upgrade fails, we will rebuild PHYTWO from scratch, including its network configuration,
Proxmox environment, and PBS instance. This process may take time, but it will be done methodically
to avoid introducing instability into the fabric.
Expected Impact
- NS2 will be offline temporarily.
- Some internal tooling may experience brief interruptions.
- Limited member‑facing and peering services may be affected.
In the event of a failed upgrade, PHYTWO may remain offline for an extended rebuild period due
to our volunteers having outside pressures and commitments, but core vIX operations will continue
on PHYONE. We work on the exchange as time permits and in a method to avoid burnout of our
volunteers during this rather involved project.