Information & announcements

[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.

[Yorus]

@cobito will let us know which components you need for each thing. Maybe someone has things at home that we can donate to the cause.

And well, they are always interesting threads to exchange opinions and see how you are progressing in decision making and then in assembly and preparation.

Happy summer!

[cobito]

The first phase of hardware renewal is finished.

The Ryzen 9 9900X has been put into operation and is now handling the video encodings of the Peertube instance. In addition, transcriptions have been re-enabled (they were turned off because the other server couldn't keep up) which the new machine also does. For now I can say that the performance with Whisper is brutal. With ffmpeg I still have to see more work to know how much it has improved but off the bat, each core is 3-4 times faster than before.

Regarding noise, it's an absolutely silent machine, to the point that I don't know how much noise it makes because I only hear the others.

Also, the Peertube instance has been updated to the latest version: 7.3. There are many changes for administration, but there are also visual improvements, functionality improvements and quite a few bugs fixed.

The next phase of renewal was going to be the NAS. But since I haven't bought a PC for myself since 2006, I'm going to renew my battle machine which is in dire need of it.

[cobito]

I've spent some time pushing the Ryzen 9 9900x to its limits and have come to several conclusions:

• 256GB of RAM is not necessary. The CPU falls short with models that consume around 20GB of RAM.
• NLLB is fine for translation between mainstream languages, but there's a video in Finnish out there and it's an absolute disaster. In the medium term, it's important to have robust translations in languages other than Western European ones.
• There are other superior models (much superior) like Tower+ but they are brutally slow with just the CPU.

I'm considering the different options I have without a GPU, which are not many or good, but there are some acceptable ones, even if only to get by and learn.

Regarding plugging in a graphics card, I've found this information regarding performance and prices. Using 16-bit floating point types:

• Ryzen 9 9900x: 8.6 Tflops
• Nvidia RTX 4060 ti: 177 Tflops (x20 the CPU). 450€
• Nvidia RTX 4090: 300Tflops (x35 the CPU). 2800€
• Nvidia H100: 1000Tflops (x116 the CPU). 34000€

Regarding saying that the last two options are just illustrative examples. But all this makes one think that a graphics card would give a very important boost to the issue. Unfortunately, the neglect of all these years has meant that there are other priorities regarding the acquisition of new hardware.

For now, we will continue to gain know-how so that when the time comes, the GPU issue can be better evaluated.

[pos_yo]

@cobito
Although in AI, Nvidia is unbeatable, that's beyond any doubt, AMD's GPUs are doing a good job with ROCm and it's in the latest versions of Mesa by default and with official AMD support. They still have a lot of work to do, though.