Myserv One Official and only lemmy community.

Currently this instance is run by just me, however there is currently an effort started to figure out what happens if I am away on holiday and there is an emergency/site down situation with other trusted instance admins.

It will be a long work in progress, starting simple but eventually enabling another trusted admin to do everything to get the server back online including start/stop the vps via api calls if it has died.

To begin with I am working on this with just 1 other admin for now - the admin from boulder.ly - who is creating a docker image that will allow us to connect to each other instances and resolve basic problems. This will be extended as we have time to add them.

Also I am having to create the workflow and documentation on what to do in various scenarios and the commands and processes and procedures to do them.

Eventually also (although not being worked on now) we will need to consider how bills are paid if another admin dies/drops off the face of the earth and how that process might look. For now we will have to leave this until the more basic stuff is in place.

This is a complex procedure for various reasons especially revolving around access rights and permissions so I will keep you updated as we progress. It will be some weeks before the basic stuff is ready but main thing to know is its a problem being worked on so that we are not in the situation where an instance is run by just 1 person who cant be available 24/7 and there will be eventually some way to protect users if real life happens to the owner of the site.

As there is a lot of work to get even a simple setup going please be patient, it is being worked on slowly and will be a constant work in progress for some time.

Have been getting some training from other instance admin on how to configure this. Will require a lot of changes to accomplish this change. So will be looking into setting this up later next week once I have accommodated all the basic stuff that needs to be done first. Once this is ready to be done I will let you know then deploy it to this site and (hopefully) not cause downtime during the change.

Pete

After upgrading to 0.18.3 email is not functioning. Temporarily I have had to turn this off, but if you lose oyur password it will not be possible to gain access until the bug is resolved. I have logged a bug on github, hopefully a solution can be found quickly.

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Will be working on the site later to improve the backup and there will be some downtime later for an hour or so while I work on it.

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You can view server stats here. Updated at 00 and 30 minutes.

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https://publicscreens.q8p0.c17.e2-3.dev/cpu1.png

https://publicscreens.q8p0.c17.e2-3.dev/mem1.png

https://publicscreens.q8p0.c17.e2-3.dev/uptime1.png

https://publicscreens.q8p0.c17.e2-3.dev/fsusage1.png

https://publicscreens.q8p0.c17.e2-3.dev/ioact1.png

https://publicscreens.q8p0.c17.e2-3.dev/netact1.png

https://publicscreens.q8p0.c17.e2-3.dev/ioms1.png

For day instead of week, replace the 1 for a 2 eg: cpu2.png

When backing up/maintenance you can open a private window and should be able to access http://lemmy.myserv.one

Note: Same website, but not https. Only http. Will need to use a private window or browser will try to access old https site no matter what you do especially on mobile.

This will let you check in maintenance is happening. Secret. Dont tell anyone.

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I will be testing an offsite backup strategy over the coming days where docker volumes are moved to storage offsite so in the case of total server suicide a new server can be rebuilt and totally recreated. This will incur some downtime during testing. I will comment in this thread when I intend to tun a test so you at least know when the site will be down for 15 minutes or so during a test.

This is so that a separate company to the company hosting the vps has a copy of data so that everything can be fully recreated even in a disaster where one or the other company removes or cannot retrieve data related to this instance.

Pictures which is many sizes of magnitude larger cannot be backed up at this time so if there was a major issue, while text would be restored images would be lost. This decision makes the instance a lot cheaper at this time. At some future point this could be changed so a copy of all pictures are kept but I cannot pay for 2 separate object stores per month at this time. It is also not critical data but more a nice to have if we grow large enough.

Kind regards Pete

Was a security release. Update took a 1-2 minutes. All fine.

Updated to 0.18.2-rc.2 to fix an XSS vulnerability found. Sorry for all the updates today. Just how it goes.

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Have move pictrs to object storage so entire deployment now consists of: 1x VPS 1x Object storage location for images.

Tnx all.

Upgraded to 0.18.2 and RC1 for the UI due to the recent issues. Site was down for about 30 minutes during the update.

Due to the vulnerability in Lemmy being found I will be forced to upgrade today. Unsure exactly when and I am/will be making backups when I am able to plan out how to do the update.

Apologies if the site is down when you need to use it. Will also be making new registrations harder while this is ongoing.

In a few days I will have to take the site down for a few hours. Will post when that will be as I know. Reason will be to take a backup and copy down all the site over the internet so that I can ensure the upgrade doesn’t mean I cant rollback if needed.

Will upgrade soon after planning and checking how others handle the upgrade. Will be in a few days time.

Hi all,

Did some speed improvements to memory and CPU to try ensure that the instance remains fast as it gets bigger.

As with all "improvements" sometimes the opposite outcome occurs so while it should be more optimized, let me know if it is not.

CPU is currently hovering around 5% usage and memory is at about 20% so as far as I can tell nothing is under pressure.

Traffic in and out is about 300KiB/s but I will continue to monitor.

Database is only 1.6GB and Pictrs (thumbnails?) is 3.2GB so things are still small.

Remember that lemmy instances are run by volunteers not companies so there may be some risk in a lemmy instance closing down and you losing your account.

Your posts will still exist as they have been federated to the other instances at large but one annoying thing would be losing all your subscribed communities.

When you have a nice account setup, you should stay safe by creating another account on another instance as a backup and following this post on how to have it subscribe to all your communities for you.

Alternatively you can subscribe manually but it can take a long time if you subscribe to a lot.

Either way having a backup account would be good practice. If this is your main account here that is fine and so long as you have another account elsewhere on another lemmy instance with the same communities subscribed in the event of a server going dark it wont affect you.

Here is the post with instructions for windows : https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/343976

Server was updated to 0.18.0 today from 0.17.4. Took about 5 minutes.

If there is a community you want to subscribe to, then search the full url in the search box

eg: search for "https://lemmy.world/c/apple_enthusiast" without quotes

You may have to wait a few seconds then click the search button again as it has to retrieve the information from the other instance.

Test