Hi,
What I got from the recent survey¹ was that most people reading this
just like email and IRC, so possibly this is doomed to failure, but
there was reasonably strong showing for Telegram and Matrix so…
There's a BitFolk Telegram group at https://t.me/+hRAT7UOOJFc1MDE0
which anyone is welcome in.
I will make a Matrix room as well on the same basis. I have to say
though that I personally don't enjoy using Matrix very much and so
the majority of my personal casual waffling goes to either Fedi or
Telegram, and I do not see that changing unless Matrix becomes a
better product.
All (that goes for IRC and email too) subject to a reasonable code
of conduct that will have to be fleshed out at some point.
If they see no use, so be it. 😀
Thanks,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
Hi,
OggCamp '24 is in Manchester, UK on 12/13 October.
https://oggcamp.org/
I'll 99% be going, so hope to see some of you there!
Thanks,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
[And now with some copy-paste errors fixed]
Hi,
On Mon, Mar 25, 2024 at 01:32:17AM +0000, Andy Smith via BitFolk Users wrote:
> So, if you do actually engage in online chat for any projects or
> communities please would you fill in this short questionnaire to let
> us know about it?
>
> https://forms.gle/cYyP2QFZzpDWdJ9T6
Responses seem to have stopped now, so here's a summary.
There were 35 responses - thanks!
## Prefer
1. IRC: 15
2. Telegram: 9
3. Discord: 7
4. Matrix: 4
5. Slack: 3
6. Mattermost: 1
## It's OK
1. Slack: 16
2. IRC: 14
2. Telegram: 14
3. Discord: 11
4. Matrix: 9
5. Mattermost: 3
## Dislike
1. Discord: 15
2. Slack: 14
3. Matrix: 6
4. IRC: 5
5. Telegram: 4
6. Mattermost: 2
## Never used
1. Mattermost: 29
2. Matrix: 16
3. Telegram: 8
4. Discord: 2
4. Slack: 2
5. IRC: 1
Looking for the positives, if I award 1 point for "prefer" and half
a point for "it's ok" then:
## Arbitrary scores
1. IRC: 22
2. Telegram: 16
3. Discord: 12½
4. Slack: 11
5. Matrix: 8½
6. Mattermost: 2½
However, opinions seem quite polarised about some. e.g. if we also
deduct a point for "Dislike" then:
## Arbitrary scores including haters
1. IRC: 17
2. Telegram: 12
3. Matrix: 2½
4. Mattermost: ½
5. Discord: -2½
6. Slack: -3
I will take a little time to consider these results.
Thanks,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
Hi,
This mail is about BitFolk's customer chat which is currently the
IRC channel #BitFolk on Libera, and maybe expanding it to other
chat platforms. If that doesn't interest you then you can safely
just ignore this email.
I realised recently that despite there being around 45 actual people
present in BitFolk's customer chat, for a while now it's been
basically silent.
I'm prepared to accept that it's become an idle zone, but if it's
the case that people are chatting elsewhere then I'd consider going
where the users are before giving up on it.
So, if you do actually engage in online chat for any projects or
communities please would you fill in this short questionnaire to let
us know about it?
https://forms.gle/cYyP2QFZzpDWdJ9T6
I've intentionally made it so that it doesn't capture any personal
details and requires no sign-in, so please don't abuse it by
submitting it multiple times. 😀 If it still bothers you that it's a
Google property then you can just email me your thoughts off-list.
I'm not planning to close down the IRC channel as I expect the
people who idle there do so just so that they can ask what is up if
they ever need to. There isn't any actual chat there though, and I
don't see that changing now.
I'm also not promising to set something up on whichever platform
comes out top (this is not a vote!). It would be very interesting to
me to find out where people are, though.
Thanks,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
Hi,
Rather than burning tons of NVMe storage on my Mastodon cache I
thought I'd give bcachefs a go. It was upstreamed into the Linux 6.7
kernel in early January.
Seems to work.
$ uname -a
Linux social0 6.7-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Debian 6.7.4-1~exp1 (2024-02-08) x86_64 GNU/Linux
$ sudo bcachefs format \
--label=ssd.ssd1 /dev/xvdd \
--label=hdd.hdd1 /dev/xvde \
--foreground_target=ssd \
--promote_target=ssd \
--background_target=hdd
$ sudo mount -t bcachefs /dev/xvdd:/dev/xvde /mnt/cache
$ sudo rsync -SHav /opt/mastodon/web/system/cache/ /mnt/cache/
$ sudo umount /mnt/cache
$ sudo mv /opt/mastodon/web/system/cache{,.old}
$ sudo mkdir /opt/mastodon/web/system/cache
$ sudo mount -t bcachefs /dev/xvdd:/dev/xvde /opt/mastodon/web/system/cache
$ df -h /opt/mastodon/web/system/cache
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/xvdd:/dev/xvde 468G 61G 400G 14% /opt/mastodon/web/system/cache
xvdd is a 10GiB NVMe while xvde is a 500GiB HDD. It promotes stuff
to xvdd on read.
The kernel comes from Debian experimental. The only other things
that are needed are:
- about 140MiB of packaged dependencies
- a recent Rust compiler
- building bcachefs-tools from source (just "make; make install"
once you did the above two)
Of course, it may yet all end in tears.
No version of grub understands bcachefs yet so you wouldn't be able
to boot off of it.
https://bcachefs-docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html
Thanks,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
Hi,
I've reconfigured our apt-cacher to use HTTPS for communications
with deb.debian.org since that is known to work well. So, all use of
deb.debian.org through our apt-cacher will use HTTPS between BitFolk
and deb.debian.org. You don't need to (and can't) change anything on
your end.
If you know of other in-use mirror sites that are reliable on HTTPS
then I'm happy to switch them over too. Reply here or send a support
ticket please.
More info: https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Apt-cacher
Thanks,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
Hi,
Since BitFolk moved datacentre from Telehouse to IP House, and since
some customers had previously actually asked about a renewable
energy statement, I've just updated it.
TL;DR: it's 59% now and they aim for it to be 100% by February 2025.
More detail:
https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Renewable_energy_statement
Thanks,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
Hi,
Between approximately 23:07Z and 23:14Z today, due to an error in
some work our colo provider was undertaking, two servers suffered
a total network outage and our remaining servers a partial outage.
Apologies for the disruption. It is not expected to re-occur.
The two worst affected servers were "clockwork" and "macallan".
Our servers have a pair of public network interfaces and are
connected to two separate switches. The error took out one of the
switches but left our ports enabled there, so it was a blackhole for
such traffic.
At the moment we use network bonding in active-backup mode. This
didn't fail over because the link state didn't go down, so the two
servers that had the misconfigured switch as their "active"
interface experienced the longer outage.
We are in the middle of transitioning away from a bonded setup and
having separate interfaces do BGP with our colo provider and use BGP
for such redundancy. We are already doing the BGP part but have yet
to disable the bonding and split the interfaces back out. When that
is complete — which I would hope to have done in a timescale of
weeks, not months — this failure mode won't exist.
Apologies again,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
Hi,
Any bitfolkers off to FOSDEM in Brussels this February?
I'm going to be there Friday 2nd leaving late afternoon on Sunday
4th.
Thanks,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
