Self-hosted runners disappeared

Associated GitHub Community topic: https://github.community/t/disappearing-self-hosted-runners/137669

The customer has added some self-hosted runners for his repository, but the runners would completely disappear as if he never added any. When he refreshes, the runners would come back. Some would be Offline but would go back to being Idle after another refresh. Other times when he refreshes the runners disappear again. When the customer logs into the runner machines to check their status, he can see a lot of connection retries.

2020-10-13 21:12:44Z: Runner connect error: The HTTP request timed out after 00:01:00.. Retrying until reconnected.
2020-10-13 21:14:42Z: Runner reconnected.
2020-10-13 21:15:42Z: Runner connect error: The HTTP request timed out after 00:01:00.. Retrying until reconnected.

[shukriadams]

@nikola-jokic From an automation point of view, this is some pretty anti-user design. Why would you auto-terminate an integration that has been down for 14 days? It’s not costing Github anything that a runner that one of us hosting has gone idle. Some of us do projects as hobbies, we take breaks from them, we have lives. Is it really that much to ask that an automated build works again after a Raspberry Pi got accidentally unplugged for two weeks? I actually spend more time maintaining self-hosted runners than I build with them.

[nikola-jokic]

Hi everyone,

Since this seems to be resolved, I am going to close this issue. If you experience this issue again, you can create a new issue or write a comment here, and we will re-open it 😄