Schedule a maintenance window on one machine or on many at once from the Machines page, so renters are warned before you take hardware down.
A maintenance window tells renters that you are going to take a machine down. When
you schedule one, everybody with a running or stopped instance on that machine is
notified with the start time and duration, and a warning appears on their instance
card so they can save their work.Scheduling a window is a notification, not an action. It does not stop instances,
unlist the machine, or block new rentals. You still take the machine down yourself
when the window arrives.
The screenshots on this page use the redesigned Machines page, which is
currently in Early Access. See Using the classic Machines page
if you have not opted in — the steps are nearly the same, but you cannot set a
reason.
Go to Host → Machines and find the
machine you want to take down.
2
Open its settings
Click Settings on the machine’s card.
The Settings button on a machine card
3
Go to the Machine Maintenances tab
The settings dialog opens on Listing Settings. Switch to Machine
Maintenances.
The Machine Maintenances tab in the machine settings dialog
4
Set the start, duration, and reason
Fill in all three fields:
Maintenance start — the date and time the machine goes down. It
defaults to 24 hours from now.
Duration (hours) — how long the machine will be unavailable, as a
whole number of hours.
Reason — what the maintenance is for. See
Reasons for the full list.
A window filled in and ready to add
5
Click Add
Add stays disabled until the duration is a positive whole number and a
reason is selected. Once you click it, the window is created and renters are
notified.The new window appears in the table below the form, marked Upcoming.
If several machines go down together — a rack, a circuit, everything behind one
switch — you can schedule a single window for all of them in one pass.
1
Select the machines
Tick the checkbox on each machine you want to include, or use Select all
to take every machine in the current view. A bar appears showing how many are
selected, with a Bulk Edit button on the right.
Selecting machines reveals the Bulk Edit button
2
Click Bulk Edit
The same settings dialog opens, titled with the number of machines selected
instead of a single machine ID.
3
Schedule the window
Go to Machine Maintenances and fill in the start, duration, and reason
exactly as above, then click Add. Every selected machine gets the same
window, and renters on all of them are notified.The list below the form gains a Machine column so you can tell the
windows apart, and a summary tells you which machines succeeded and which
failed.
A bulk request covers at most 100 machines. Select fewer and repeat if you have
more than that.
The redesigned Machines page is opt-in while it is in Early Access. To turn it on,
open Account Settings, find the Early Access
section, and enable Machines page.
The Early Access toggle in Account Settings
You get there the same way: Settings on a single machine, or Bulk Edit
once you have selected several. The dialog is what differs. It has no tabs — the
window is set from a Set Machine Maintenance section partway down it — and it
has no Reason field, so every window scheduled there is recorded as
Other. Set the start date and Duration (hours), then click Schedule
Maintenance.Existing windows appear under Scheduled Maintenances, with a Category
column that shows the stored value rather than the label used on the redesigned
page — a window set to Updates reads as software here.
