State of Project Segfault: July 2023
Hey! It's been a while now, and as usual we are going to report on what we did this month. This time Midou wrote this article, so it may be different than the other times, due to Devrand and Arya's lack of availability they couldn't write this blog post like usual.
Now for Details!
UPI is now available for Indian donations
UPI is an almost no-fee payment service developed by the National Payments Corporation of India.
Its really popular in India and many Indian users have requested us to get a UPI for a while, and hence we now have one using Arya's account :)
You can find the details on the Donate page or just put `projectsegfault@icici` into your favourite UPI app and donate!
Migration of PIZZA-1 services to Soleil
We migrated the majority of PIZZA-1 Services to Soleil Levant. This was done after seeing that the usage of our VPS was getting too high and couldn't support the numbers of services we were hosting there.
Project Segfault's new short URL toggle.
We also added a new toggle to let you choose between the shorthand variant and the long one (old). This might not be that useful but it could be just in case you prefer shorter characters :)
Matrix rooms being restructured.
Midou noticed that the General (now off-topic) room started to be less related to Project Segfault and more about general discussions. So he decided to repurpose the "Public Sysadmin Discussions" room to become the main room for topics related to Project Segfault alongside discontinuing the support room in order to merge it with the room previously mentioned. To make it short and simple:
- General is now Off-Topic.
- SysAdmin is now Main.
- Support is now Main too.
We hope you aren't too confused about this but this should make things more manageable for us and more active for everyone because more rooms = less activity due to distribution of specific topics.
Hello Tailscale!
Devrand suggested we could restrict access to our internal Web UIs to reduce chances of attacks by malicious actors by using a self-hosted tailscale (headscale). So Midou just went ahead and allowed it to happen. Except we just never did anything and only configured US. Until recently where we finally added everything thanks to the work Arya and Devrand did. Now everything that requires administrator previlieges requires Tailscale which means we (theoretically) are less vulnerable to SSH brute-force attacks and such!
Soleil just got fresh new thermal paste
This isn't that important but MrLeRien thought it would be a good idea to repaste the CPU since it hasn't been done since ~2014. This should improve thermal abilities and will make the fans spin at normal speeds.
We also upgraded it to Debian 12 while we were there, so there's also that.
"That damned IRC protocol just won't die already?!"
Because Midou enjoyed the IRC experience he asked for a new IRC bridge to allow IRC users to communicate with our XMPP and Matrix members. Wait we're bridging 3 platforms now? Anyway, you can enjoy choosing your platform of choice to communicate with us!
PGP Key renewed
For those who wish to keep our discussions confidential through mail or verify our identity, we have renewed the PGP key of our contact mail.
Rsync.net storage low
This might not directly affect you, but we have decided to reduce the backup frequency to accomodate for the limitations of our rsync storage (500GB in total). Maybe someday we'll upgrade it. But currently it's not financially viable.
Kbin federation issues have been fixed thanks to a ...rabbit?
We had a few problems with kbin not being able to federate with other instances. Initially it got solved for a while but it happened again. So Arya tried to move to RabbitMQ to see if things would improve, and surprisingly, it absolutely did! Federation now works like a charm and most of the issues of kbin have been solved! You can now use kbin and rest easy knowing you won't talk on the void anymore!
Bonjour, parlez-vous français?
Just kidding, we added a new service called LibreTranslate. This is mostly meant to be used as a backend for our simplytranslate instances, and is hosted on IN Node. You can also access it directly at https://libretranslate.projectsegfau.lt / https://lt.psf.lt.
BeatBump is dead, HyperPipe takes its place.
We also decided to kill BeatBump because HyperPipe is much better. Nothing else to say here!
Libreddit and Teddit are dying.
With how Reddit started rate-limiting on JSON API requests, Libreddit and Teddit started receiving 429 errors, which means too many requests, it seems like Reddit privacy frontends for big instances are no longer a viable solution. We'll still keep them around but if the situation doesn't improve we will have to shut them down.
That is all for this month. That's a lot of changes, we hope you enjoyed reading this and that you have a nice day! And see you next month!
-Midou