supakaity

joined 2 years ago
MODERATOR OF
[–] supakaity@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 2 months ago

Poor li'l blighter got attacked by a bin chick'n and was limping away last we saw em... after goin' the bin juice drinkin' irrit of course.

[–] supakaity@lemmy.blahaj.zone 22 points 2 months ago

Apparently I was wrong, it's decided it's done and working again now.

[–] supakaity@lemmy.blahaj.zone 28 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

The pict-rs upgrade is ongoing.

From what I can tell it'll be about another 5 hours. I'm going to have to go to bed and check on it in the morning.

Unfortunately the stock-standard lemmy-ui doesn't like it that pict-rs is migrating to a new version of database and not serving images, so it's stubbornly just not working at all.

 

Hey all!

Our lemmy.blahaj.zone has been updated to v0.19.5.

Let us know if you notice any issues with the upgrade!

[–] supakaity@lemmy.blahaj.zone 24 points 4 months ago

Our best haj, Shonky (they/them) is available now, over at their own Github repository for use when referring to Blåhaj Lemmy.

I'm guessing we'll need them to make an appearance for the Canvas template.

 

Just testing image upload.

[–] supakaity@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

So this was at the very start of the s02e10 episode - "Pegasus".

[–] supakaity@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 8 months ago

Not that I am aware of, and not that it's not possible, but the protocols are quite different, the Lemmy API, the Misskey API (with various dialects for Sharkey, Iceshrimp and Firefish) and the Mastodon API (with Akkoma, Pleroma, etc) are all very different from each other and even making a third party UI that completely understands and implements a single API / dialect is an enormous undertaking.

[–] supakaity@lemmy.blahaj.zone 18 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I think it's because a lot of her fans were like "hang on, she's just misunderstood, she's not really transphobic, just doesn't want those fake transes going into women's spaces", and Rowling kept it pretty vague, open for misinterpretation, not really ever able to be pinned down as actually being provably transphobic in the minds of many.

But something happened recently and it tipped her over the edge, from keeping her donations low key and her transphobia aimed at the theoretical "not really a woman 'trans-identified-male' boogeyman-woman" (who doesn't really exist), to outright making open donations to anti-trans groups and attacking real trans women.

All the sudden her supporters are like... Wait, this is not who we thought you meant… Where are these scary men? The ones invading women's spaces that you were talking about?

[–] supakaity@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Wow, okay that's weird. It's doing it for me too, must be some debugging option

I've been using alexandrite and haven't noticed.

I'll take a look tonight.

[–] supakaity@lemmy.blahaj.zone 12 points 8 months ago

For a desktop client, it actually works pretty nice on mobile too.

[–] supakaity@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

okay, i'll take a look... probably something to do with the media proxy or the pictrs config.

[–] supakaity@lemmy.blahaj.zone 13 points 8 months ago

Yeah, you just need to login again and put in your totp code this time. Kinda annoying that it doesn't provide a field for your totp code on the first page.

 

Hi all our lovely users,

Just a quick post to let you all know that along-side the upgrade to 0.19.3, we've also added a couple of alternate UIs to the Blåhaj lemmy for you.

Obviously the default lemmy-UI at https://lemmy.blahaj.zone still exists and has been updated to 0.19.3 alongside the lemmy server update.

There's also now an Alexandrite UI at https://alx.lemmy.blahaj.zone which is a more modern, smoother UI, written in svelte, by sheodox.

And then for those who are nostalgic for reddit days of yore, and memories of when PHP websites last ruled the earth, there's MLMYM (courtesy of rystaf) at https://mlmym.lemmy.blahaj.zone.

Please enjoy, and I hope the upgrades work well for you.

 

Esto es una prueba

 

Test

115
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by supakaity@lemmy.blahaj.zone to c/main@lemmy.blahaj.zone
 

We're currently in the process of migrating our pict-rs service (the thing responsible for storing media/images/uploads etc) to the new infrastructure.

This involves an additional step of moving our existing file-based storage to object storage, so this process will take a little time.

New images/uploads may not work properly during this migration, however existing images should continue to load. We expect this migration to take about an hour.

[EDIT]

Migration has completed.

685,271 files / 153.38 GB were migrated. Copying to object storage took about 1.5 hours. Starting service back up on new server and debugging took another 30 minutes.

Timeline:

  • Migration started at 2023-10-01 22:43 UTC.
  • [+1h32m] Objects finished uploading to object storage at 2023-10-02T00:15 UTC.
  • [+2h06m] Migration was completed at 2023-10-02 00:46 UTC.
 

Blåhaj Lemmy will be down for database migration to the new servers in approximately 1.5 hours from now (06:00 UTC).

Downtime is estimated at under an hour.

I will have more details on the maintenance page during the migration and update the status as the migration progresses.

 

The server will be briefly down while we install a new updated version of lemmy and restart it.

The maintenance window is 15 minutes, but should be much shorter.

 

So it's been a few days, where are we now?

I also thought given the technical inclination of a lot of our users that you all might be somewhat interested in the what, how and why of our decisions here, so I've included a bit of the more techy side of things in my update.

Bandwidth

So one of the big issues we had was the heavy bandwidth caused by a massive amount of downloaded content (not in terms of storage space, but multiple people downloading the same content).

In terms of bandwidth, we were seeing the top 10 single images resulting in around 600GB+ of downloads in a 24 hour period.

This has been resolved by setting up a frontline caching server at pictrs.blahaj.zone, which is sitting on a small, unlimited 400Mbps connection, running a tiny Caddy cache that is reverse proxying to the actual lemmy server and locally caching the images in a file store on its 10TB drive. The nginx in front of lemmy is 301 redirecting internet facing static image requests to the new caching server.

This one step alone is saving over $1,500/month.

Alternate hosting

The second step is to get away from RDS and our current fixed instance hosting to a stand-alone and self-healing infrastructure. This has been what I've been doing over the last few days, setting up the new servers and configuring the new cluster.

We could be doing this cheaper with a lower cost hosting provider and a less resiliant configuration, but I'm pretty risk averse and I'm comfortable that this will be a safe configuration.

I woudn't normally recommend this setup to anyone hosting a small or single user instance, as it's a bit overkill for us at this stage, but in this case, I have decided to spin up a full production grade kubernetes cluster with a stacked etcd inside a dedicated HA control plane.

We have rented two bigger dedicated servers (64GB, 8 CPU, 2TB RAID 1, 1 GBPS bandwidth) to run our 2 databases (main/standby), redis, etc on. Then a the control plane is running on 3 smaller instances (2GB, 2 CPU each).

All up this new infrastructure will cost around $9.20/day ($275/m).

Current infrastructure

The current AWS infrastructure is still running at full spec and (minus the excess bandwidth charges) is still costing around $50/day ($1500/m).

Migration

Apart from setting up kubernetes, nothing has been migrated yet. This will be next.

The first step will be to get the databases off the AWS infrastucture first, which will be the biggest bang for buck as the RDS is costing around $34/day ($1,000/m)

The second step will be the next biggest machine which is our Hajkey instance at Blåhaj zone, currently costing around $8/day ($240/m).

Then the pictrs installation, and lemmy itself.

And finally everything else will come off and we'll shut the AWS account down.

 

Discussion of the current situation with the Blåhaj instances, and upcoming maintenance.

 

Our lemmy is now running the 0.18.2 release version, which should fix some lingering issues we've been having.

Let @ada or myself know if there's any issues!

 

Hi everyone, I'll begin migrating the lemmy blåhaj database to the new server this morning in about 20 minutes.

Expected duration is about 1 hour for this migration.

There will be a maintenance page up during the migration and I will be updating the status as we go to keep you updated on the process.

Later today I'll also be upgrading the software to the latest release as well.

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