Hello

I have noticed that the server have been going down a lot for 10 - 20 mins.

Unfortunately, I'm currently on vacation, so I don't think I will have the time to fix it.

I will be back tomorrow evening and will look into it and hopefully fix it then.

EDIT: There was a misconfiguration of the auto scaling setup. This scaled the system up and used all of its CPU, which caused the site to be unresponsive.

This should be fixed now, but I will keep monitoring it.

While working on a small fix to lemmy, that was causing some unneeded cpu usage, I made a change that unfortunately caused the db and pictrs service storage to be deleted.

Thankfully I have backups of everything, so I went to restoring from a backup. However the restoring was very slow, since I used an unoptimal way to backup the db(raw sql dump). After the first backup completed, I found out that it was missing data, so I tried an older backup, but that didn't work either. It was missing data as well. So I tried a backup from another server(Since I backup to 2 different servers), which finally worked.

Usually restoring from backups, haven't taken too long previously, since my backups are faily small, but I will need to look into a quicker way to restore backups for lemmy, since the backup size of lemmy is much bigger.

NOTE: Data from ca. 2 hours before the site went down(16-18 UTC) will be missing and I'm unable to restore it.

The s3 host that pictrs use, have gone down.

I might have to move to another s3 host, which will mean it will take a bit before images are working. This will cause a loss of images for the last 2-3 hours before pictrs stopped working.

EDIT: Have moved to new s3 host. Unsure how many images were lost during the outage.

Local time can be seen here

0.19.3 is mostly bugfixes. See release notes here for more information.

There should be no downtime or very minimal downtime. If there are any issues, check the uptime site here or site status here

Local time can be seen here

0.19.2 contains fixes for outgoing federation and a few other things. See release notes here for more information.

There should be no downtime or very minimal downtime. If there are any issues, check the uptime site here or site status here

EDIT: The server went down / was very very slow to respond. I'm not quite sure why.

The 0.19 version is out and I expect to update sometime during the next week. Since it is a big release, I will need to spend some more time testing, that everything still works fine and ensure that the migration works without problems as well.

I will update with another post, when I know, when the update will take place.

The update fixes an issue with moderation actions sometimes not federating correctly(See release notes here).

There should be no or very minimal downtime. To convert UTC to your local time, use this

I expect a very minimal downtime of ca. 5-15 mins.

I had made some config changes to the database earlier in connection with the move to a new server, that caused the storage usage of the database to grow a lot. Then when it had no more space left, it crashed which caused the downtime. Unfortunately it happened at a time, where I wasn't available to fix immediately, which is why it was down for so long.

It is now fixed and I will keep a watch(setup an alert for database disk usage) to make sure it doesn't happen again.

Seems to be caused by low amount of available storage. This caused k8s to evict/delete pods -> site went down,, then it would fix itself -> site goes up again but then k8s would evict again -> site goes down. This continued untill it stabilized at some point.

This should be fixed and there should be more space available, when I move the server to a new host. I expect to move to a new server sometimes in the comming week. Will annonce the date, when I know, when it will happen.

EDIT: Spoke a little bit too soon, should be fixed now though.

EDIT2:

There was something that kept using storage, so ran into the issue again. Then the volume/storage for the image service(pictrs) stopped worked for some unknown reason(Thankfully, I have backups) and there shouldn't be any images lost.

Good news is that I have reclaimed a lot of storage, so shouldn't be in danger of running out of space for a long time.

While preparing for migration to a new host, I had to setup the db, but during that I deleted a resource in k8s to force a reload of settings in the db. This caused the db to use a different volume and it took a bit before I could revert it back to using the old volume.

No data should have been lost. Let me know, if anything is missing.

Same thing as yesterday.

Unfortunatly the tool for scanning CSAM didn't detect the image, so to ensure there are no CSAM on the server, images for the last 8 hours has been deleted.

The filesystem manager(longhorn) I use reported that multiple volumes were faulted. This caused the site to go down.

I have no idea why the volumes faulted, only that a reboot of the server fixed it. Hopefully this was a strange one off and it doesn't occur again.

To make it easier to deferate from unwanted instances I have switched to using the fediseer. With this tool I can get censures from other trustworthy instances. A censure is a "completely subjective negative judgement"(see more here) and reasons for the censure can be listed.

Currently I'm using the censures from lemmy.dbzer0.com(Can be seen here), that has any of the following reasons for the censure

• Lolicon
• CSAM
• Fascism
• Hate speech
• Bigotry
• Pedophilia
• Bestiality
• MAP

I will still manually deferate from instances, when it is needed, but this makes easier to deferate bad instances I would have missed/didn't know about.

Note: The automated deferation also includes spam instances, which is currently defined by

• More than 30 registered users per local post + comments
• More than 500 registered users per active monthly user.

The main reason is that they allow/support pedophilia, but they also allow zoophilia and biastophilia. They try to label it as MAP(minor-attracted person), but it is still pedophilia. Example of MAP post here.

There have been a report of CSAM and unfortunately the lemmy-safety doesn't go through the images quickly enough(on my hardware) to be of use in this case.

I think there exists a tool to purge a image via information from a post, but wasn't unable to find it now. In the future I can hopefully use that tool, when reports of CSAM come in.

To ensure that there aren't any CSAM or other problematic images, I have setup db0's lemmy-safety tool. This will scan images and delete them, if there is a high chance that it is an illegal or unethical image.

Unfortunately, the tool isn't perfect, so sometimes perfectly fine images might be deleted after you have uploaded them. In that case you need to upload a different image, since a similar image will probably be flagged as well.

When the moderation tools for lemmy are better I can hopefully remove the scanning tool, but untill then I think this is the best option.

If anyone has an alternative/better idea, I would love to hear it.

There has been CSAM on another instance and since it might have federated to this instance, I have deleted the images for the last 24 hour.

New images from now on should work. Let me know, if they don't.

The site will go down(a maintenance site will be shown instead), while the migration is ongoing. I expect it to take 10-20 mins if everything goes well.

EDIT: I thought I would able to move images in the background before the main migration, so that I could avoid having the site down for multiple hours. Unfortunatly after testing the migration, I have found that it is impossible to do. So the site will probably be down for 3-4 hours, since there is about 100GB of images, that needs to be migrated.

EDIT2: Images have now been successfully migrated. Let me know, if any images are missing.

There shouldn't be any downtime, since it is a simple upgrade with no database migrations.

EDIT: Has now been successfully updated to 0.18.4. There were no issues, so nothing should be lost.

Thanks to [email protected] there have been added an official self hosted version of alexandrite, which new.endlesstalk.org now uses. There have also been added more features in the update(See here)

Let me know, if there's any issues with the update.

There should be no downtime and no content should be lost.

Let me know, if anything is not working!