Maintenance, reboot and power off
Announce the window first
Section titled “Announce the window first”Scheduled maintenance hurts your reliability score far less than sudden downtime. A machine that disappears mid-rental is a failed rental; a machine that announced a window is a machine doing housekeeping.
Announcing a window does three things:
- turns listing availability off for its duration,
- pauses new rentals 2 hours before it starts, so you are not handed a fresh 6-hour booking 10 minutes before you pull the machine,
- notifies clients.
Running rentals are allowed to finish. Automation leaves the machine alone.
You give the window a start, an end, a category — gpu, power,
internet, disk, software, other — and a reason that clients see. Write
the reason as something a renter can act on: “Replacing thermal pads on GPU 3
and 6” beats “maintenance”.
Reboot
Section titled “Reboot”What happens: everything running on the machine stops. Telemetry resumes when it comes back.
Afterwards: the host comes back on its own. The agent starts with the system and reports again within a couple of minutes.
Because a reboot breaks the connection by design, the machine confirms the command completed on its first reconnect rather than immediately. The panel allows up to 15 minutes for that.
Power off
Section titled “Power off”What happens: everything stops and the host powers down. It stays off until someone turns it on.
Update the GPU driver
Section titled “Update the GPU driver”What happens: the GPUs go down and the host usually reboots.
This is the operation the installer deliberately refuses to perform, because it turns adding monitoring into restarting a server. From the panel it is an explicit choice with up to 30 minutes to complete.
The guards
Section titled “The guards”Reboot, power off and driver update are refused while a machine is earning or about to. The refusal names the machine and what to do:
- Rented on Vast.ai — wait for the rental to end, or stop it on the marketplace first.
- In search on Clore.ai — take the machine out of search first, then come back.
This is enforced by the server, not by the button. A script or an assistant calling the API hits the same refusal, because a guard that lives only in the interface is not a guard.
Two confirmations, not one
Section titled “Two confirmations, not one”Destructive actions ask twice, and the two questions are different on purpose:
- What will happen — the effect and the recovery, in plain words.
- Which machine — you confirm the name.
The second exists because the first is the one people learn to click through.