Information & announcements

[krampak]

Mother of God, what an odyssey boss!

[Fassou]

This is Atlas carrying the celestial vault, or @cobito lifting the server, now I can't remember

A great one!

[Sylver]

What a shame not to be able to return even a tiny part of what you do for us @cobito... What a great job

One way or another, it seems that Debian is still surrounded by dangers as that computer science professor told me years ago... But I bet he didn't have to face as many additions as in this case.

Anyway, a million thanks as always, and I hope to be able to contribute as much as I can to the cause.

Best regards!

[cobito]

@krampak said in Information & announcements:

My God, what an odyssey boss!

Yes, this time it has been tough. Many services and each one of their own father and mother.

@Fassou said in Information & announcements:

This is Atlas carrying the celestial vault, or @cobito lifting the server, now I can't remember

A great one!

If Atlas were made of spaghetti, there would be doubt

@Sylver said in Information & announcements:

What a shame not to be able to return even a tiny part of what you do for us @cobito... What a great effort

One way or another, it seems that Debian is still surrounded by dangers as that computer science professor told me years ago... But I bet anything that he didn't have to face as many additions as in this case.

Anyway, a million thanks as always, and I hope to be able to contribute as much as I can to the cause.

Best regards!

No shame at all. As long as you drop by every now and then to look, that's fine. Debian is not the easiest although this time it has been more bad luck than anything else.

Well, in principle, everything is already functional. I've seen that even problems that were there when viewing the museum magazines (a problem that the previous version of Imagemagick had) have been solved and the emulations work again (something strange that Nginx did that I couldn't fix).

I still have to take a look at the forum with the CSS.

[cobito]

For the past few days, a group of malicious bots have been flooding the server with requests. Due to a series of changes by Debian that I need to study, the iptables rules for the web are not working, so I have to manually enter IPs and entire networks into the multiple Nginx configurations.

Because of this, and until the "attack" ends, some services might be temporarily unavailable (today, for example, they managed to take down Redis).

[kynes]

@cobito I know what you're talking about. My store is being targeted by the tiktok bot, which is terribly aggressive and doesn't respect robots.txt

Good luck, it's a very tedious task that awaits you.

[cobito]

The forum and Peertube and Mastodon instances will be updated next weekend (it is still unclear whether on Saturday or Sunday).

In principle, it is a routine process and should not take too long.

[cobito]

A few hours ago a security patch was released that fixes a critical vulnerability in Mastodon. The flaw is caused by something called Cross Site Scripting, which allows malicious scripts to be injected into trusted websites that, in this case, would have been our instance.

The patch is already applied so in this weekend's action, one less thing. We are on version 4.2.5.

[pos_yo]

@cobito Yes, I had read something. Thanks for your work!!

[cobito]

Well, that's it for now.

Regarding Nodebb, a problem should have been resolved so that the moderation team can manage user emails according to a bug reported by @Fassou a while ago.

Regarding Peertube, which has had a major version change, the main new features for the user are:

• Thumbnails have been added to the video progress bar, so that by hovering over it, specific moments can be visualized*.
• It is now possible to create chapters in videos.
• Improvements have been made to the player that make it faster and make it adjust better to certain aspect ratios.

*Regarding thumbnails, they are currently being generated for all videos, so at this time, they will only be available in new uploads.

And I'll take this opportunity to mention that tonight is the monthly check of the RAID array, so tomorrow everything will be quite slow in general.

[Fassou]

Mr. @cobito is a genius, who makes all these upgrade and update tasks seem almost easy.

Keeping to schedule, in good shape and with Changelog

[cobito]

@Fassou Thanks man, it's a pleasure (when things work out on the first or second try at most).

[cobito]

Since yesterday, the RAID is being rebuilt due to a problem with a disk. The process is painfully slow, much more so than last time. This is causing huge wait times to access the NAS, so everything on Hardlimit will be quite slow in the coming days.

While we're at it, I'll take this opportunity to inform you that last week, an "emergency" update was made to Mastodon due to some critical security flaws on the platform.

And finally, in two or three weeks, an update campaign will be carried out that will cover the forum and the Peertube instance. It should be a routine process that will be carried out on a Saturday or Sunday.

[Sylver]

Many thanks for the information and dedication, Honorable Mayor @cobito

I was already surprised that yesterday the forum didn't load a couple of times in the middle of the afternoon.
I was going to notify you privately but it came back up shortly after, I imagine it was already in the process of rebuilding the RAID.

Greetings!

[Yorus]

Thanks @cobito!. Yes, yesterday I noticed slowness in Mastodon, especially in loading images, but I assumed some kind of maintenance or improvement.

[cobito]

This morning the matrix reconstruction has finished, so from now on, everything should be back to normal.

When the Peertube team has released version 6.2 of the platform (probably next week), I will schedule the updates. By the way, this version comes with some very interesting features.

[Yorus]

Yes, everything is going great, Floro, Mastodon... thanks!

[cobito]

Nodebb has been updated to version 3.8.4 (from 3.6) which doesn't bring major changes for the end user but rather new features for moderation and administration.

Peertube has also been updated to version 6.2.1 from 6.0.3. This update brings AI to Hardlimit for the first time with Whisper, a feature that automatically adds subtitles to videos. For now, subtitles will only be added to new videos and starting from the last quarter of the year, we will begin transcribing all old videos (prior to today).

Regarding Whisper, I've run a couple of videos and the results are truly amazing.

From a hardware perspective, a new machine has been added to host the Redis server. It's an Asrock J3455 board with 16GB of RAM that joins the main server and the NAS.

The reason for separating Redis is that it's a program that's very demanding of disk I/O, which slows down the entire system and consumes a lot of RAM. Additionally, it dumps the database (about 7GB) to disk every 10 minutes, so it's constantly hammering the operating system's disk buffer. By isolating it on its own machine, I hope to significantly lighten the load on the main server, which will require quite a few additional resources from Whisper.

By the way, the monthly RAID array verification will be done this morning, so until tomorrow afternoon, everything will be a bit slower than usual.

As usual, if you see something strange, please let me know.

[Fassou]

Great job Mr. Cobito!

But take a little bit of the sun, it's getting too white and it's August.

You have a free hammock right there.

[Sylver]

Many thanks for the great work, mayor @cobito

For now everything is in its place.
We will be attentive to any unforeseen alteration.

Best regards!