@jerry@fedia.io avatar

jerry

@jerry@fedia.io

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jerry,
@jerry@fedia.io avatar

Howdy! Mbin (and lemmy) are very different things. It’s sort of like the difference between Twitter and Reddit. You can sort of interact back and forth, but to get the full experience, you have to either be on a lemmy or mbin (or piefed) instance.

jerry,
@jerry@fedia.io avatar

What works for me on both mastodon and Lemmy is a free text question: why do you want to join?

The user enters whatever they like and it goes into a moderation queue. Both lemmy and mastodon send me an email when a new account is ready to review.

I read the response and choose to whether to approve their account. At the moment, spammers are really bad at answering the “why do you want to join” questions.

Account creation issue (lemmy.world)

When trying to register, I fill out a username, email, and password (copy/pasted from a password manager, so no chance of mistyping). I complete the captcha, check the consent box, click register, and... nothing. Page refreshes, but there's no errors displayed or anything. I've tried resetting my password, but I never get an...

jerry,
@jerry@fedia.io avatar

If you can, please try again. If you still have problems, shoot me an email to jerry@infosec.exchange and I'll troubleshoot the issue

jerry,
@jerry@fedia.io avatar

and there was much rejoicing!

jerry,
@jerry@fedia.io avatar

Ahh - thank you!

jerry,
@jerry@fedia.io avatar

thank for pointing that out. Its on my list to fix

jerry,
@jerry@fedia.io avatar

I am not aware of a way - but that seems like a good feature request

jerry,
@jerry@fedia.io avatar

ok - I took a bit different approach. Since I know what error in rabbitmq's log file is associated with things coming to a stop on fedia.io, I installed swatchdog and set it up to look for that word (which is, btw, "timeout"). I created a script that stops all the messengers, then stops php-fpm, keydb, and rabbitmq. Then it start rabbit, keydb, and php-fpm in order. Finally, it restarts the messengers.

I will be surprised if it works first time, so it may still crash again but I'll be watching

jerry,
@jerry@fedia.io avatar

That sounds like a recently introduced bug. I’ll report it.

jerry,
@jerry@fedia.io avatar

Fedia is still having some stability issues. I set up some automation to detect the problem and then restart the services. If you were to look at that page while the services were restarting, you will see that error

jerry,
@jerry@fedia.io avatar

It is possible. I will investigate and work on a fix

jerry,
@jerry@fedia.io avatar

I moved fedia.io away from fastly. I have a nagging feeling it has something to do with fastly. Can you let me know if you continue to see this?

jerry,
@jerry@fedia.io avatar

This annoys me about the fediverse - people take a chance on coming here and then repeatedly get left in the dark when their instance is shut down. That's why I was so very happy when you and others helped me get fedia.io back to healthy.

jerry,
@jerry@fedia.io avatar

Most interesting: the problem had only been happening on MS Edge on my laptop. I have been using safari on my phone without issue. Just a bit ago, i refreshed the page and now every time I revisit the site, I have to log back in, just like on Edge. It’s like the old session expired and the new ones aren’t sticking. I’ll try FF on my phone.

Note: even in the time I started typing this reply to when I hit the “add comment” button, I got logged out

jerry,
@jerry@fedia.io avatar

I have so many errors in prod.log that it's hard to tell for certain, but when I try to filter out those that are associated with failed federation events, that seems to be when I'm left with. I am trying again to see if I can confirm

jerry,
@jerry@fedia.io avatar

I do not have 2fa active at the moment

jerry,
@jerry@fedia.io avatar

I do not have 2fa turned on right now.

jerry,
@jerry@fedia.io avatar

Indeed. I am trying to get it to happen again now that I’ve got the logs filtered down to a manageable level.

jerry,
@jerry@fedia.io avatar

ok - I just had it happen again while looking at logs. interestingly, there was NOT a CSRF log when that happened. There were a bunch of other errors, but enough that I could look through all of them and see that they were all related to activitypub issues - signaturevalidator and the like

jerry,
@jerry@fedia.io avatar

it's hard to make a blanket statement, because it depends on the details of the application. CSRF attacks are definitely real and common, but using csrf tokens isn't critical in every application. For example, I think we have CORS headers enabled, I don't think we have functionality that allows embedded iframes, but we do allow links - if we have administrative functions that can be triggered solely with GET parameters, then someone could trick an administrator into doing something that caused damage by clicking on a link in a post. The only one that would obviously work that I can see is "logout", which would be annoying, but not world ending, and would work for everyone, not just administrators.

jerry,
@jerry@fedia.io avatar

Is anyone on mstdn.social following your fedia.io account? If not, that is the problem.

jerry,
@jerry@fedia.io avatar

all posts/actions made by any server don't go to every other server. There has to be a relationship between a server and an account on another server in order for that server to "subscribe". Once someone on a server follows your account, your public posts are visible to others on the server. If no one on the server follows you, they would have to specifically search for your username and follow you, and at that point, they would see new posts you make after they followed you.

There are activitypub relays that mitigate this issue a bit, but neither lemmy nor mbin support those.

jerry,
@jerry@fedia.io avatar

Can you shoot me the IP address(es) you are assigned? I will see if there is some reason the firewall would be blocking them. Beyond that, I am guessing Orange is doing something to filter it

jerry,
@jerry@fedia.io avatar

The recent version seems to cause PHP to off into space somewhat frequently. I am working to mitigate it - which will likely, at least for a while, require me to restart the services every few hours until we can figure out what the actual cause is.

jerry,
@jerry@fedia.io avatar

Please let me know if you continue to see this problem n

jerry,
@jerry@fedia.io avatar

Please let me know if you continue to see this problem n

jerry,
@jerry@fedia.io avatar

I see a (very handsome, I might add) image from you with alt text there

jerry,
@jerry@fedia.io avatar

😅 I think I have it fixed now so hopefully no need to go into my safe

jerry,
@jerry@fedia.io avatar

Ok, I think the problem is fixed now.

jerry,
@jerry@fedia.io avatar

Thanks for reporting that - I am working to fix it - not sure what is going on yet

jerry,
@jerry@fedia.io avatar

Hi. Yes, nearly all the previous issues have been fixed. There are still occasional issues with federation breaking, but I’m working on that.

I will try to reproduce the DM issue between this instance and a lemmy instance. It would not surprising me if that doesn’t work, though.

jerry,
@jerry@fedia.io avatar

Hello. I applied the most recent mbin upgrades, which I believe may fix this. can you try again?

jerry,
@jerry@fedia.io avatar

Anyone who follows you across the fediverse can see the post

jerry,
@jerry@fedia.io avatar

It’s more nuanced than that. If they look at your profile from a mastodon/etc instance, they’ll see the post. If they are on an instance that has someone who follows you and watch the federated/globel feed, they’ll see the post. And a few other specific situations.

jerry,
@jerry@fedia.io avatar

Hetzner makes their own servers in a form factor that works for their rack space. There are lots of YouTube videos on that. I don’t know specifically why these are failing, but being an old time engineer and knowing the CPU they are running, I am going to bet it has something to do with cooling. Either the main board is getting too hot (I monitor CPU temp and that seemed fine) or it is related to either vibration from the certainly larger CPU fan it needs, or somehow related to how the CPU impacts the power supply - possibly creating noise that ultimately burns out capacitors or something similar.

jerry,
@jerry@fedia.io avatar

Fedia.io has 422 monthly active users - basically, 422 accounts have logged in within the past 30 days. I suppose I am comparing it to infosec.exchange, which has about 15000 monthly active users. I do believe that fedia.io is the most active mbin or kbin instance, by a factor of 2 or 3, but relatively quiet in comparison to Mastodon and Lemmy.

jerry,
@jerry@fedia.io avatar

Apologies for having registrations closed. The moderation tools in Mbin/kbin are very very basic and I keep experiencing large numbers of spam signups, with no meaningful way to handle them until they sign up and start spamming

jerry,
@jerry@fedia.io avatar

I will add that to my to do list

jerry,
@jerry@fedia.io avatar

yes, it's working on catching up now.

jerry,
@jerry@fedia.io avatar

It's working through the backlog now. Another obscure bug in an incoming message that stopped message processing.

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