State of Project Segfault: February 2024
Another month, another blog-post! This month, we had many changes, including yet another Pizza1 provider migration, a few Pubnix fixes, a new Domain registrar and more!
Pizza1 migration, again
Around the 19th of February, our previous provider for our EU Node (Pizza1), Nonic Cloud (a subsidiary of Oxide Hosting), notified us regarding a take-down request from the Russian Federation's internet regulator, the Roskomnadzor, asking us to block paths regarding a certain Youtube Channel, proxied through our Invidious instance, which seems to have published content that was against the country's regime.
If you are interested, the path they wanted us to block is: https://invidious.projectsegfau.lt/channel/UC9GX7E1o69jz1QvO5QvbkZQ
This was a common occurrence for Invidious/Piped instances, owing to the lack of understanding regarding how Privacy Front-ends work by governments and non tech-savvy people, and the solution to console the provider, is to send the take-down template.
However, for some weird reason, Nonic decided that we had to comply with a malicious take-down notice, by a foreign government, which had no right over the censorship of a service hosted in the Netherlands, and whose operators do not reside in Russia. Their excuse was that they had to "maintain their relationship with upstreams", which seems like a disingenuous argument, since there is no way in hell that a provider, registered in the UK with servers in the Netherlands, had upstreams who wanted to be complicit with the censorship by the Russian government.
You can see the full email thread on this Hedgedoc note
Hence, we decided to move to another provider, Avoro. It is a German provider, linked with the age-old PHP Friends service provider. Their specs are almost identical to what we got with Nonic, though we got slightly more SSD and a few extra vCores (though the shared CPU is older), and it's cheaper in the long term!
Additionally, we decided to encrypt the disk of the new server.
PS: If you face any issues with sending mail via Simplelogin, its because the IP is current blocked by the Spamhaus SBL blocklist, though according to the customer support of Avoro, they are in contact with Spamhaus to resolve this.
Pubnix's XRDP is back
Somehow, Midou managed to fix the Pubnix's XRDP system, which allows you to access the Pubnix graphically through the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP).
Be aware that the RDP's framerate is not smooth since it's not designed to be fast in the first place.
For more info, see: https://wiki.projectsegfau.lt/Log_in_to_the_Pubnix_from_RDP
US Node disk encryption
US Node's disk should be encrypted now, which increases our system security.
And this also means that all of our servers, including our backups, are now encrypted!
We are now on Netim (mostly)
Since our long domain, projectsegfau.lt was about to expire, we took the time to migrate it to Netim, which is another "good" domain registrar.
This also comes with the ability for us to get proper DNSSEC on our main domain.
Project Segfault Draupnir is back !
In order to continue to fight spam that we receive on Matrix, we have decided to setup a small private Matrix instance running Draupnir moderation bot.
This should mean we get less spam on our Matrix rooms in the future.
Ejabberd gets matrix federation support !
Since the release of Ejabberd 24.02, matrix support have been added. We added support to this, which in turn should theoretically also mean that XMPP users will be able to communicate with Matrix users, using their favorite XMPP client. Be aware that since this is still new. A lot of bugs and problems may occur. From our tests it's pretty buggy, so be careful to not rely on it for now.
-Arya & Midou