Move services hosted on lizard.tails.net to a rented machine at Hetzner
Context
Since mid-2025, TPA has been discussing the renewal of the whole fleet of Tails physical servers because of age depreciation or hardware failures. The failing physical machines have already been dealt with (see ADR-0106 and #42402).
lizard.tails.net is a physical machine that hosts several services for Tails
and will complete 12 years of age in 2026 and is far passed our normal
depreciation policies (5-6 years).
Decision
Since the whole of Tails Jenkins CI is in the process of being moved to rented machines at Hetzner, TPA will move all services currently hosted in Lizard to a new rented machine also hosted at Hetzner.
Consequences
This will eliminate network bottlenecks between the CI and other Tails services with which it integrates, while fitting into the current budgetary restrictions.
After this move, all Tails services used for development and distribution of the product will live in rented machines in the same datacenter in EU. This will:
- eliminate potential network issues caused by the need to transfer large amounts of data between continents,
- ensure all services will be running on newer hardware whose maintenance will be covered by the rental costs, and
- allow for the retirement of a 12 years-old machine.
More Information
Cost estimate:
- one time setup fee of 99 EUR.
- 90 EUR / month.
Metadata
- status: proposed
- decision-date: 2026-03-09
- decision-makers: ISS director
- consulted: tpa-team@lists.torproject.org, foundations@tails.net
- informed: tor-project@lists.torproject.org
- forum-url: https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/tails-sysadmin/-/issues/1821a 8