News

Welcome Arya: Introducing Our New Sysadmin and Announcing Major Changes

Project Segfault

• 2 min read

Happy New Year, everyone! 🎉

Please welcome our new sysadmin, Arya. He's been a sysadmin for the ~vern project since its inception, and has now joined Project Segfault.

He's presented us with different perspectives and ideas, as well as making significant contributions, that have allowed us to make some major changes for the better

The documented and upcoming changes below will bring about a better experience for our users.

India Server

Arya has kindly provided us with a Self-Hosted server in Mumbai, allowing us to provide even more people with low latency access to our services.  In addition, we will use this server for backups. Thankfully, this server also has a backup battery for both the router and laptop hosting it. As a result, downtimes due to power outages, as experienced with Soleil Levant, are less likely to occur. This server will be setup for production in the following weeks. A separate blog post will be posted when the India server comes online.

The specs for this server are:

  • i3 6006U CPU with 2 Cores and 4 Threads
  • 4 GB DDR4 RAM
  • 1 TB RAID1 HDD
  • 256 GB M.2 SSD
  • 300 MB/s uplink and Static IP with Bharti Airtel

New services and Frontends

Some new services include:

We will follow up with more frontends in the weeks and months to follow.

DNS Changes

We now run our own authoritative DNS servers with the help of Knot-DNS. This provides us with more control over our infrastructure.

The most important takeaway from this is GeoDNS, which automatically provides you the IP address of the closest server to you geographically.

Currently, we are testing this feature on a subdomain, which you can access at servicename.g.projectsegfau.lt. We will make GeoDNS default in another 7 days, as informed by the announcement we made earlier in both our matrix room and the website.

We are using a local GeoIP (Maxmind GeoLite2) database, meaning that your IP address is never sent to any third parties and will never be logged.

Additionally, if you use a privacy-respecting DNS Resolver like Quad9, it will not share your IP address with us at all since they have EDNS Client Subnet disabled. This means it will use our closest server to the DNS Resolver itself. Changes like these will result in changes to subdomains, but we will try to make the switch as clean and backwards compatible as possible.

You can opt out of GeoDNS at any time if you do not want this functionality by changing the links to servicename.eu.projectsegfau.lt or servicename.us.projectsegfau.lt.

Instance auto-redirects

GeoDNS will be used for services that do not have user signups and can be switched without much trouble, however for services that have databases, we will redirect instead of silently changing the DNS IP behind the scenes.

Coming Soon...

Since we now have many geographically scattered nodes, we plan to run our own mini CDN to speed up our website.

Soon, our website will also be available on IPFS to make it more resilient to censorship.

Pubnix, a long awaited feature, will also be coming soon.

Finally, an XMPP server, along with a bridge with Matrix, should be expected in the near future.

Finally, thank you, to all the donators and users of Project Segfault.


- Devrand