xtremeownage

joined 1 year ago
MODERATOR OF
[–] xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com 8 points 5 months ago

Eh... Mutually assured destruction.

It's a very scary phrase.

[–] xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com 11 points 6 months ago

Its a going. One day at a time.

[–] xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com 7 points 9 months ago

No.

I wouldn't vote for Hillary period for many reasons. Her sex is not one of them.

A random fact, I actually did vote for a woman to be president. But, it damn sure was not Hillary. There is too much stink associated with her. Too much shit swept under the rug.

I'd gladly donate a few TB, but Not about to fill my entire array for books i'll never read...

I'm gonna wait a few years, until prices go waaay down.... and I plan on doubling/tripling the PV capacity, which will make everything much more effective, as well.

How did you get that rate? We pay 33 cents, and it was 24 cents just a few months ago… wouldn’t be surprised if it goes up again next year and the year after since even 33 cents is government subsidised (so - there’s no cheaper option available).

All about location. There are supposedly many in my area on a different coop utility, who are only paying 0.03c/kwh.

Ooof. Why’d you do that? We simply put (a bit over) 5kW of panels on the roof, and a good 5kW inverter. One day of sun generates about as much power as we use in a week, and even if it’s overcast we still come out ahead.

I had a few other goals I wanted to accomplish-

  1. Reliability. The grid here isn't the most stable, and blinks a few times per week. And, a time or two per year, we have an outage. This solution has handled this fantastically well, so well, that I don't even notice when the grid has dropped unless I specifically go for it.

  2. Apart of this, was bringing some of my wiring/electrical up to code. This accounted for 10k of the price-tag... I relocated/replaced the mains panel across the house to a location more suitable then my daughter's closet. Also- the panel itself, was pretty old, and needed to be modernized.

One more issue- my PV is undersized a bit. Adding another 3kw, would yield much better returns for me.

Its undersized, because if I oversized it, and sent more energy than I consumed, my lovely utility slaps on a 42$ fee.... which is no-bueno.

[–] xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

If the ROI => 25 years, then it's not worth it- because the hardware and equipment is considered deprecated at that point.

If it lasts 30 years, sure, its making good use of itself. But- everything is rated between 15-25 years. As such, after that period, it's considered end of life, and no longer supported.

Now- I will note, it is not worth it for the "Rate I currently pay", which is 0.08c/kwh. If next year, my electricity rates tripled, it would vastly reduce the amount of time until this solution reached ROI. And- I am betting that electricity does not get cheaper in the future, otherwise I would have not have pulled the trigger on a 50,000$ project, where the math told me it wasn't the best idea.

Also, if you really want to see everything quantified- I plan on publishing all of the math, and numbers at the one year mark... which will be around march. -> https://static.xtremeownage.com/pages/Projects/Solar-Project/

[–] xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com 13 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Coming from someone who owns them-

Nah, it's not worth it.... at least, if you strictly look at "saving money" overall.

ROI is on average 10-25 years, depending on your current cost of energy. The components/inverters/etc, are usually rated for 20-25 years.

At least- this applies if you have a properly licensed contractor install everything. If you do everything yourself, its extremely worth it, and would achieve ROI in a decade or less.

[–] xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What will realistically happen?

Nothing. Companies will just spend a hair more money finding ways to circumvent the new taxes. And, if the new taxes were not easily circumvented- they would just relocate the company to another country with lower taxes.

In the end, the consumer is paying the taxes, and not the company itself, either way.

[–] xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com 13 points 1 year ago

Well, I use plex, because I have used plex for a decade, and it just works.

That being said, if I were to use an alternative, Jellyfin is quite fantastic. I actually have a pod running it, just in the event that plex pulls a stupid move, causing me to lose faith in its platform.

But, that being said, I like the plex interface more then Jellyfin, and have grown accustomed to it.

Also, Kodi while powerful and extensible... just feels like a bear compared to Jellyfin.

[–] xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com 47 points 1 year ago (13 children)

So, I am starting to really believe his goal is to just drive a stake into the heart of twitter.

Either that, or he is trying to prove a point regarding something.

I don't think there is any possible way, he is so dumb as to make all of these horrible decisions regarding twitter.... This has got to be destroying twitter by design, on purpose.

I mean, seriously.... he has done literally everything that you SHOULDN'T do. Fire the majority of the company. Destroy over a decade worth of very good branding. Alienate all investors. Alienate the user base. Piss off the remaining users more. Drive away advertisers....

FFS, the dude has a company that sends rockets into space, and previously, the world's premier electric car company... What in the hell is his odd obsession with choking the life out of twitter, that has been costing him money left and right due to absolutely horrible publicity.

Lets say, you work somewhere, that does, say.... https decryption and/or logs stuff... or the firewall just blocks stuff in general.

And, you want to say, access that stuff.

Well, you can route your web traffic through a ssh connection, instead of it going out the traditional path. This allows you to bypass content filtering, etc.

Its, essentially like having a VPN tunnel, routing your traffic. Amazing feature.

 

As promised, if I brought the instance offline, I would give you a heads up in advance.

Here are the reasons for me coming to this decision-

Moderation / Administration

Lemmy has absolutely ZERO administration tools, other then the ability to create a report. This, makes it extremely difficult to properly administer anything.

As well, other then running reports and queries against the local database manually, I literally do not have insight into anything. I can't even see a list of which users are registered on this instance, without running a query on the database.

Personal Liability

I host lemmyonline.com on some of my personal infrastructure. It shares servers, storage, etc. It is powered via my home solar setup, and actually doesn't cost much to keep online.

However- for a project which compensates me exactly $0.00 USD (No- I still don't take donations). It is NOT worth the additional liability I am taking on.

That liability being- currently trolls/attackers are literally uploading child-porn to lemmy. Thumbnails and content gets synced to this instance. At that point, I am on the hook for this content. This, also goes back to the problem of literally having basically no moderation capabilities either.

Once something is posted, it is sent everywhere.

Here in the US, they like to send no-knock raids out. That is no-bueno.

Project Inefficiencies

One issue I have noticed, every single image/thumbnail, appears to get cached by pictrs. This data is never cleaned up, never purged.... so, it will just keep growing, and growing. The growth, isn't drastic, around 10-30G of new data per week- however, this growth isn't going to be sustainable, especially due to again- this project compensates me nothing. While- hosting 100G of content, isn't going to be a problem. When we start looking 1T, 10T, etc.... That costs money.

Its not as simple as tossing another disk into my cluster. The storage needs redundancy. So, you need multiple disks there.

Then, you need backups. A few more disks here.

Then, we need offsite backups. These cost $/TB stored.

I don't mind hosting putting some resources up front to host something that takes a nominal amount of resources. However- based on my stats, its going to continue to grow forever as there is no purge/timeout/lifespan attached to these objects.

I don't enjoy lemmy enough to want to put up with the above headaches.

Lets face it. You have already seen me complain about the general negativity around lemmy.

The quality of content here, just isn't the same. I have posted lots of interesting content to try and get collaboration going. But, it just doesn't happen.

I just don't see nearly as much interesting content, as I want to interact with.

Summary-

I get no benefit from hosting lemmy online. It was a fun side project for a while. I refuse to attempt to monetize it as well.

As such, since I don't enjoy it, and the process of keeping on top of the latest attacks for the week is time consuming, and boresome, The plan is simple.

The servers will go offline 2023-09-04.

If you wish to migrate your account to another instance-

Here is a tool recently released.

https://github.com/gusVLZ/lemmy_handshake

 

A heads up....

Since, attackers/etc are now uploading CSAM (child porn....) to lemmy, which gets federated to other instances....

Because I really don't want any reason for the feds to come knocking on my door, as of this time, pictrs is now disabled.

This means.... if you try to post an image, it will fail. As well, you will notice other issues potentially.

Driver for this: https://lemmyonline.com/post/454050

This- is a hobby for me. Given the complete and utter lack of moderation tools to help me properly filter content, the nuclear approach is the only approach here.

 

I am just wondering... is it me- or is there a LOT of just general negativity here.

Every other post I see is...

  1. America is bad.
  2. Capitalism is bad. Socialism/Communism is good.
  3. If you don't like communism, you are a fascist nazi.

Honestly, it's kind of killing my mood with Lemmy. There are a few decent communities/subs here, but, the quality of content appears to be falling.

I mean, FFS. It can't just be me that is noticing this. It honestly feels like I am supporting a communist platform here.

I am on social media to post and read about things related to technology, automation, race cars, etc.

Every other technology post, is somebody bashing on Elon Musk (actually- that is deserved), or talking about Reddit (Let it go. Seriously. We are here, it is there).

On my hobby of liking racecars, I guess, half of the people on lemmy feel it is OK to vandalize a car for being too big.... and car hate culture is pretty big.

All of this is really turning off my mood regarding lemmy.

2
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com to c/lemmyonline@lemmyonline.com
 

Sorry for the ~30 seconds of downtime earlier, however, we are now updated to version 0.18.4.

Base Lemmy Changes:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/compare/0.18.3...0.18.4

Lemmy UI Changes:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/compare/0.18.3...0.18.4

Official patch notes: https://join-lemmy.org/news/2023-08-08_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.18.4

Lemmy

  • Fix fetch instance software version from nodeinfo (#3772)
  • Correct logic to meet join-lemmy requirement, don’t have closed signups. Allows Open and Applications. (#3761)
  • Fix ordering when doing a comment_parent type list_comments (#3823)

Lemmy-UI

  • Mark post as read when clicking “Expand here” on the preview image on the post listing page (#1600) (#1978)
  • Update translation submodule (#2023)
  • Fix comment insertion from context views. Fixes #2030 (#2031)
  • Fix password autocomplete (#2033)
  • Fix suggested title " " spaces (#2037)
  • Expanded the RegEx to check if the title contains new line caracters. Should fix issue #1962 (#1965)
  • ES-Lint tweak (#2001)
  • Upgrading deps, running prettier. (#1987)
  • Fix document title of admin settings being overwritten by tagline and emoji forms (#2003)
  • Use proper modifier key in markdown text input on macOS (#1995)
 

In, addition to updating lemmy just now-

The storage issues have been resolved, the hosting issues have been resolved....

And things should return back to stable and reliable now.

Lemmy 0.18.3 Notes

1
The issue, and next steps (lemmyonline.com)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com to c/lemmyonline@lemmyonline.com
 

Turns out... its ceph storage.

Despite having 7x OSDs on bare metal NVMe... despite having DEDICATED 10G network connectivity.... Its having significant performance issues.

Any spikes in IO (Large file transfers, backups. Even copying files to a different server) would cause huge IO delays, causing things to break or drop offline.

There are no errors shown. The configuration is pretty standard. I have no idea why it is having so many issues.

I have cleared off a new NVMe, and will move this server to it tomorrow, and hopefully end all of the issues from this week... Assuming I have any users left here. (I wouldn't blame you for leaving, it has been a really bad week for LemmyOnline)

IF, my assumptions are incorrect, then f-it, I will just run lemmy on a bare metal server I have on standby.

Update

Server migrated to local storage. Was, nearly unnoticeable, unless you did something in the 3 minute window it took to clone/restore/etc.

 

Just finished migrating to a different server... hopefully this helps some.

 

As a continuation from the FIRST POST

As you have likely noticed, there are still issues.

To summarize the first post.... catastrophic software/hardware failure, which meant needing to restore from backups.

I decided to take the opportunity to rebuild newer, and better. As such, I decided to give proxmox a try, with a ceph storage backend.

After, getting a simple k8s environment back up and running on the cluster, and restoring the backups- lemmy online, was mostly back in business using the existing manifests.

Well, the problem is.... when heavy backend IO occurs (during backups, big operations, installing large software....), the longhorn.io storage used in the k8s environment, kind of... "dies".

And- as I have seen today, this is not an infrequent issue. I have had to bounce the VM multiple times today to restore operations.

I am currently working on building out a new VM specifically for LemmyOnline, to seperate it from the temporary k8s environment. Once, this is up and running, things should return to stable, and normal.

 

I don't know about y'all.... But, I am really looking forward to CS:II

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