Information & announcements

[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!

[cobito]

@Fassou said in Information & announcements:

Great work 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.

A Unix book of take it easy.

[pos_yo]

@cobito The transcription of PeerTube works pretty well. With the limitations of the existing Whisper models, of course, but it's something I can now save myself from doing manually.

Many thanks.

[cobito]

This morning Peertube was updated to version 7.0.1. We had to redo all the CSS because they made important changes to the interface, so there might be a color or the position of some element that looks a bit strange. If you see anything, you already know.

[cobito]

Mastodon has been updated to v4.2.17 due to a serious security flaw. The details of the flaw have not been disclosed.

[cobito]

Today Peertube has been updated to 7.1.1 due to security flaws whose details will be revealed this Tuesday. In addition, when changing the revision, new features have also been included. For its update, it has been necessary to jump to nodejs 20, something that affects the forum tangentially and should not be noticed.

Mastodon will continue to be out of service for a few hours because the content is being moved from storage unit and the directory structure is an absolute mess. I hope that everything will be ready by tonight.

Edited: Mastodon is already online.

[cobito]

The other day I got in touch with the council of wise men from Hardlimit to organize a meeting and discuss the strategies for the next course, but it turns out that they have all died of old age.

So with the savings from salaries, several budget items will be established that will be used to renew the different machines that keep this whole thing running.
The idea is to continue providing service to the current pages, some of which have seen their performance severely deteriorated in the last year due to lack of hardware resources (mainly the Peertube instance).

In addition, with the time savings that comes from not having to keep attending the useless council meetings, a series of development hours will be allocated to resume the different projects that have been abandoned for quite some time, such as the test bench and the museum for which there are several requests and a long list of wishes.

And with a little luck, new avenues can be opened to expand the range of resources offered from this house.

As for the new hardware, after the summer I will start the topic and open the first thread for you to advise me on a new machine. There are three projected, but only two are priority:

1. A powerful machine intended for hard processing: video encoding, audio transcription and experiments with AI (which will be used for very specific issues and in no case to mess up the forum or turn Hardlimit into another zombie of the dead Internet). I have this one pretty much defined in general.

2. A NAS of which I will make a copy-paste of the previous one I built (with current components) because the topic came out reasonably well. I have doubts mainly with the disks.

3. A front-end server (the least priority and which perhaps will be left until the next campaign). Here I am not clear about the topic and I have to see how the current one behaves when all the heavy load has been moved to the power machine.

In general, the three have to meet four issues above any other: they have to be very quiet, very reliable, of reduced volume (maximum micro-ATX) and they have to require very little maintenance considering that they will be on 24/7.

All the technical and economic details will be given in each new thread.

While we're at it, I take this opportunity to say that the cover, which has been on hold for a couple of weeks now, will not receive new content until September.

Happy summer.