State of Project Segfault: December 2023

Just before we start: Happy New Year :D

This month, we had a few quality of life improvements to our services, and also have started steps to make our infrastructure more robust.

Restructure and Ansiblization of IN Node

After the instability on IN Node (probably due to the haphazard migration from Soleil after its decommissioning), we have decided to do a complete restructure of IN Node, while also making it completely ansible-based, which should make it more lean. In other words less maintenance will be required.

Work on this has already began, and should hopefully be completed by Jan-end.

US2 coming soon

Devrand has recently gotten fiber, so you can expect US2 in a month or two.

This should allow us to lift some load off IN Node and Pizza1, and give a smoother/faster experience for US Node users.

Piped/Invidious are back to using their node's proxy instead of relying on EU

TL;DR: the video playback will be faster (hopefully!)

Thanks to Arya (ab)using his ISPs PPPoE thing, IN node now has an extra rotatable IPv4, which is now used for proxying Invidious and Piped.

On the other hand with US Node, we started using Hurricane Electric Tunnelbroker to get an extra /64. Its not the fastest (maxes out at around 100 MB/s) but its good enough for our needs, and for sure is better than using the EU proxy.

We have moved from Libreddit to Redlib

Redlib is a new Libreddit forks by one of the maintainers of Libreddit, which uses a new method of extraction which bypasses ratelimits (for now atleast). We will implement a certain rate limit similar to nitter as to not allow reddit that we're abusing their APIs.

Invidious has been scaled for EU's needs

In order to prevent excessive slowdowns on our EU node, we have decided to scale (ie. add multiple load-balanced instances of invidious) it.

This should result in better performance.

Matrix Media Repository restored

Our old matrix instance's media repository has been restored, which should allow media uploaded to the instance before the shut down to still be accessible.

This is especially useful for people who stored emotes (custom emojis) and such with us on our old instance.

I2P discontinued

I2P mirrors of our services have been discontinued due to excessive resource usage, lack of use and generally being hard on maintenance.

CAA record applied on our domains

Especially after the jabber.ru MITM issue, we have decided to enable the CAA record on our domains, with only DNS-01 authentication allowed. This essentially shouldn't affect you. In other words, you're now safer when connecting to our servers and nobody should be able to abuse this issue and listen to your traffic when connected to our servers.

XMPP captcha fixed

Our XMPP server used to have a broken captcha in the registration page, which essentially caused problems when an user wanted to register. This is now fixed! We updated the links on the wiki to reflect the new location to go to register properly.

Gitea runner fixed too

While we're at it, we also fixed the runner, the reason for it being down was simply due to the gitea server restarting. Midou went ahead and wrote an OpenRC script for the runner so that it keeps restarting if it ever fails again. You can now re-run your actions if yours failed for a while now!

-Arya & Midou