This month, we have made many optimizations, finally completed restructure, upgraded the India node, received a generous sum of donations, and more!

Donations

This month, we have received a large amount of donations and have finally reached 300 EUR!

Thank you to all donators who are helping support us :)

Backups

We decided to buy 500GB of offsite backup storage for our plans of having proper backups! (Because yes.. we have been running Project Segfault without any backups for months now.)

Our backup storage provider is rsync.net. They seem to be reputable enough for us and even offered us a student discount of 40%.

You should check them out they're pretty cool.

This helps eliminate the risk of us having irrecoverable data loss.

PS: Yes we are publishing this post on World Backup Day :P

Official PGP Key

Project Segfault now has an official PGP key, which allows you to contact us securely through email.

You can find the key on keys.openpgp.org and on our contact page.

Server News

Soleil slowdowns fixed

For a few months, we have been experiencing slowdowns on Soleil Levant, and we have investigated the issue, finding it to primarily be an issue with the temporary 2 reverse proxy setup.

Basically, proxying Caddy through Nginx caused many issues and causes requests to heavily slow down. We had this weird setup because we needed to perform the restructure in an incremental way, slowly moving from the old infrastructure to the new infrastructure.

After painful database migrations, and transferring huge amounts of user-uploaded media, we have finally migrated most of our core services to the new restructure VMs, and this issue is now gone.

Restructure

The restructure has been finished! Though it didn't go completely as planned, and we had to make some small changes and exceptions to the original plan, it has been finished.

Hardware upgrade for India node

The server in India has been migrated to a 2017 MacBook Pro, which is significantly less jank than the previous server setup.

You should expect better performance on this new hardware.

Hebergnity is back!

In January this year, Hebergnity, the provider for our Status VPS was hit by a VMware ESXi ransomware, and was taken down.

Due to this, we migrated to a OVH VPS, which costs more than the previous server.

Luckily, Hebergnity recovered from the ransomware attack, and is operational again.

Unfortunately, docker support is currently broken, so we are waiting for that issue to be fixed before we migrate back.

HSTS and Security Headers

We recently implemented HSTS on all our nodes, meaning that your connections to our services are forced to use HTTPS.

We have also submitted our domain to the HSTS preload list for increased security.

Additionally, we have also added some security headers to help protect against XSS and clickjacking.

Content Security Policies, however, are different per-service and hence will be rolled out slowly.

US2 Node?

Devrand has purchased a new Dell Poweredge r720 that maybe used as a Project Segfault node in the future.

As of right now, the server has a 10 Mbps up internet connection, which would be overwhelmed instantly if it were to come online.

However, he speculates that new fiber internet providers will be moving into his area in the coming months.

If fiber becomes available in the area, this Poweredge will become the second server for the United States region.

There is no ETA on this, and it may take months to years.

Here are the tech specs of the server:

• Dual Intel Xeon E5-2680 v0
• 64 GB DDR3 ECC memory
• 2 x 1TB NVMe SSD
• 2 x 500GB SAS HDD

We hope for this server to be part of the Segfault fleet as soon as Devrand can get a better internet connection.

Service News

All our rooms have been bridged to XMPP!

All our official rooms have been bridged to their XMPP counterpart on conference.projectsegfau.lt! You can find a guide on signing up to our instance on the wiki.

We hope this allows more users to be able to communicate with us.

Auto-updates for Privacy Frontends

We have decided to start auto-updating our privacy frontends.

This is because there are rarely any breaking changes on them and they receive updates extremely frequently, many of which are vital for the service to function.

We hope this makes our frontends the best ones out there.

Wiki now supports pretty-urls

Our wiki now supports pretty URLs.

This means you can access pages with just https://wiki.projectsegfau.lt/Example_Page instead of the longer https://wiki.projectsegfau.lt/index.php?title=Example_Page.

Invidious proxying has been re-enabled

We have re-enabled DASH (1080p) and video proxying by default on invidious.projectsegfau.lt (Soleil Levant), inv.bp.projectsegfau.lt (Pizza1) and inv.in.projectsegfau.lt (India Node).

Matrix sliding sync

A new feature of the Matrix protocol, sliding sync, is now supported.

This significantly speeds up Matrix sync times, making the experience smoother and faster.

This feature is currently only available on the Element Labs (Desktop), but if you are using the beta, the url for sliding sync is https://ssync.projectsegfau.lt

Another change we have made to our Matrix homeserver is requiring email for all new accounts. We have made this change due to increased spam on our homeserver.

Cal

On the request of another team member (midou), we setup an instance of Cal.com (Calendso).

Cal.com is an open source scheduling platform that enables you to take bookings on your own terms. Set your availability, connect your favourite calendar and video conferencing platforms, and share your link.

GotHub

We now have an instance of GotHub, a frontend for GitHub created by Odyssey and is now maintained by Arya and Midou.

In addition to the normal instances, we also have a dev instance for testing purposes which you can find at gothub.dev.projectsegfau.lt.

AnonymousOverflow

We also now have an instance of AnonymousOverflow, a frontend for StackOverflow.

Conclusion

Thank you to everyone who uses Project Segfault, especially those who donate to us.

This month has been a very good month for us, and we hope to continue to improve our infrastructure to be more secure and resilient with this support.

-Devrand and Arya