So after a few days of back and forth with support, I may have finally received some insight as to why the server keeps randomly rebooting. Apparently, their crappy datacenter monitoring keeps triggering ping loss alerts, so they send an engineer over to physically reboot the server every time. I was not aware that this was the default monitoring option on their current server lines, and have disabled it so this should avoid forced reboots going forward.

I am standing up a basic ping monitor to alert me via email and SMS if the server actually goes down, and can quickly reboot it myself if ever needed (may even write some script to reboot via API if x concurrent ping fails, or something). Full monitoring stack is still in progress but not truly necessary to ensure stability at the moment.

OVH has scheduled a maintenance window for 5:00 EST this evening, hopefully they will be able to pinpoint the fault and get parts replaced at the same time. This will likely be an extended outage as they have more diagnostics than I was able to run, so I would expect somewhere around an hour or two of downtime during this.

I am mildly tempted to go ahead and migrate Lemmy.tf off to my new environment but it would incur even more downtime if I rush things, so it'll have to be sometime later.

Update 7:30PM:

I just received a response on my support case, they did not replace any hardware and claim their own diagnostics tool is buggy. We may be having a rushed VM migration over to a new server in the next few days... which would incur a few hours of hard downtime to migrate over to the new server (and datacenter) and switch DNS. Ideally I'd prefer to have time to plan it out and prep for a seamless cutover but I think a few hours of downtime over the weekend is worth ending the random restarts. I'm open to suggests on ideal times for this to happen.

Previous post: https://lemmy.tf/post/393063

UPDATE 07/25 10:00AM:

Support is getting a window scheduled for their maintenance. I've asked for late afternoon/early evening today with a couple hours advance notice so I can post an outage notice.

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UPDATE 12:00AM:

Diagnostics did in fact return with a CPU fault. I've requested they schedule the downtime with me but technically they can proceed with it whenever they want to, so there's a good chance there will be an hour or so of downtime whenever they get to my server- I'll post some advance notice if I'm able to.

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As I mentioned in the previous post, we appear to have a hardware fault on the server running Lemmy.tf. My provider needs full hardware diagnostics before they can take any action, and this will require the machine to be powered down and rebooted into diagnostics mode. This should be fairly quick (~15-20mins ideally) and since it is required to determine the issue, it needs done ASAP.

I will be taking everything down at 11:00PM EST tonight to run diagnostics and will reboot into normal mode as soon as I've got a support pack. If the diagnostics pinpoint a hardware fault, followup maintenance will need to be scheduled immediately, ideally overnight but exact time is up to their engineers.

I'm also prioritizing prep work to get the instance migrated over to a better server. This has been in the works for a few weeks, but first I'll need to migrate the DB over to a new Postgres cluster and kick frontend traffic through a load balancer to prevent outages from DNS propagation whenever I finally cut over to the new server. I'd also like to get Pict-rs moved up to S3, but this will likely be a separate change down the road.

EDIT 07/24: This is an ongoing issue and may be a hardware fault with the machine the instance is running on. I've opened a support case with OVH to have them run diagnostics and investigate. In the meantime I am getting a Solarwinds server spun up to alert me anytime we have issues so I can jump on and restore service. I am also looking into migrating Lemmy.tf over to another server, but this will require some prep work to avoid hard downtime or DB conflicts during DNS cutover.

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OP from 07/22:

Woke up this morning to notice that everything was hard down- something tanked my baremetal at OVH overnight and apparently the Lemmy VM was not set to autostart. This has been corrected and I am digging into what caused the outage in the first place.

I know there is some malicious activity going on with some of the larger instances, but as of this time I am not seeing any evidence of intrusion attempts or a DDoS or anything.

Lemmy 0.18.1 dropped yesterday and seems to bring a lot of performance improvements. I have already updated the sandbox instance to it and am noticing that things are indeed loading quicker.

I'm planning to upgrade this instance sometime tomorrow evening (8/9 around 6-7pm EST). Based on the update in sandbox, I expect a couple minutes of downtime while the database migrations run.

I'm running the Lemmy Community Seeder script on our instance to prepopulate some additional communities. This is causing some sporadic json errors on the account I'm using with the script, but hopefully isn't impacting anyone else. Let me know if it is and I'll halt it and schedule for late-night runs only or something.

Right now I have it watching the following instances, grabbing the top 30 communities of the day on each scan.

REMOTE_INSTANCES: '[
        "lemmy.world",
        "lemmy.ml",
        "sh.itjust.works",
        "lemmy.one",
        "lemmynsfw.com",
        "lemmy.fmhy.ml",
        "lemm.ee",
        "lemmy.dbzer0.com",
        "programming.dev",
        "vlemmy.net",
        "mander.xyz",
        "reddthat.com",
        "iusearchlinux.fyi",
        "discuss.online",
        "startrek.website",
        "lemmy.ca",
        "dormi.zone"]'

I may increase this beyond 30 communities per instance, and can add any other domains y'all want. This will hopefully make /All a bit more active for us. We've got plenty of storage available so this seems like a good way to make it a tad easier for everyone to discover new communities.

Also, just a reminder that I do have defed.lemmy.tf up and running to mirror some subreddits. Feel free to sign up and post on defed.lemmy.tf/c/requests2 with a post title of r/SUBREDDITNAME to have it automatically mirror new posts in a particular sub. Eventually I will federate that instance to lemmy.tf, but only after I'm done with the big historical imports from the reddit_archive user.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/433151

Just an FYI post for folks who are new or recently returning to Lemmy, I have updated the linked grease/tamper/violentmonkey script for Lemmvy v0.18.

These two scripts (a compact version and a large thumbnail version) substantially rearrange the default Lemmy format.

These are (finally) relatively stable for desktop/widescreen. Future versions will focus a little more on the mobile/handheld experience.

These are theme agnostic and should work with darkly and litely (and variants) themes.

• Greasyfork here: https://greasyfork.org/en/users/1107499-mershed-perderders
• Github here: https://github.com/soundjester/lemmy_monkey
  • If you need the userscript for Lemmy v0.17.4, that can be found here:
    • https://github.com/soundjester/lemmy_monkey/tree/dev-v1.11-Lemmy-v0.17
    • this v0.17.4 userscript is no longer in active development

Screenshot of "Compact" version

main page

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comments page

As always, feedback is appreciated!

I've been stalling on this but need to get some form of community rules out with the added growth from the Reddit shutdown. These will likely be tweaked a bit going forward but this is a start.

Rules

1. Be respectful of everyone's opinions. If you disagree with something, don't resort to inflammatory comments.

2. No abusive language/imagery. Just expanding on #1.

3. No racism or discrimination of any kind.

4. No advertising.

5. Don't upload NSFW content directly to the instance, use some third party image host and link to that in your posts/comments.

6. Mark any NSFW/erotic/sensitive/etc posts with the NSFW tag. Any local posts violating this rule are subject to removal (but you can repost correctly if this happens).

7. Hold the admins/mods accountable. If we start making changes that you disagree with, please feel free to post a thread or DM us to discuss! We want this instance to be a good home for everyone and welcome feedback and discussion.

NSFW Content Policy

As stated above, please upload any NSFW images to an external site and link them. All NSFW content must be properly tagged, and cannot contain material illegal in the United States.

Additional rules around NSFW content may be added in the future, if necessary. We would prefer everyone use common sense with their posts so we don't have to crack down on this category.

Defederation Policy

Many large instances have started to defederate "problem" instances. We want to avoid doing that unless an instance is causing illegal content to get indexed directly onto our server.

If we encounter the need to block some other Lemmy server, we will engage the community here before taking action.

Bot Policy

Bots are currently allowed on this instance, but we reserve the right to add restrictions if they start getting abused. You're more than welcome to use moderation bots for any communities you run or moderate, and content import/mirroring bots are okay. If you have a bot that is actively creating new posts/comments here, please make sure to use some reasonable rate limits.

Bots are subject to all instance rules.

So Lemmy 0.18.0 dropped today and I immediately jumped on the bandwagon and updated. That was a mistake. I did the update during my lunch hour, quickly checked to make sure everything was up (it was, at the time) and came back a few hours later to everything imploding.

As far as I can tell, things broke after the DB migrations occurred. Pict-rs was suddenly dumping stack traces on any attempt to load an image, and then at some point the DB itself fell over and started spewing duplicate key errors in an endless loop.

I wound up fiddling with container versions in docker-compose.yml until finding a fix that restored the instance. We are downgraded back to the previous pict-rs release (0.3.1), while Lemmy and Lemmy-UI are both at 0.18.0. I'm still trying to figure out what exactly went wrong so I can submit a bug report on Github.

Going forward, I will plan updates more carefully. We will have planned maintenance windows posted at least a few days in advance, and I may look into migrating the instance to my Kubernetes cluster so we can do a rolling deployment, and leave the existing pods up until everything is passing checks. In the meantime, I'm spinning up a sandbox Lemmy instance and will use that to validate upgrades before hitting this instance.

If your feed is sorted by New or includes local content, you may notice a TON of new posts showing up on reddit_ communities here over the next few days- I am attempting to scrape as much content as I can from Reddit prior to the API pricing changes on July 1. All of this content will be limited to the reddit_* communities on this instance, if you don't wish to see this content you can simply block the communities as they appear.

If anyone has requests for a subreddit mirror, drop them in the comments and I'll try to get to your request sometime this week.

Edit: Halted since random other Lemmy instances managed to auto-index my new subs, I don't want to flood any feeds outside of lemmy.tf with this. Since I can't control other instances auto discovering my new communities, all Reddit cloning will now occur in a new, defederated instance.

All import activities are now taking place at https://defed.lemmy.tf/.

Has anyone made or found a script to scrape a subreddit and import it to a Lemmy community? There are a handful of smaller subs that I'd like to mirror over to my instance (with author attribution) but haven't found anything that works yet. https://github.com/rileynull/RedditLemmyImporter looks promising but links to a non-functioning Python script (tries to use Pushshift, which isn't working at the moment).

Not much has changed today. Email verification is now disabled as we seem to have hit some bug where it just craps out until the Docker pods are restarted, I'm probably going to leave this disabled unless we start getting some large influx of spam users.

Default theme has also been changed to Darkly - Red which feels a bit more reminiscent of Reddit.

Some thoughts on image uploads

Image storage remains my primary concern for instance scalability. I am fairly limited on local storage since the server running this instance is all-NVMe, so if the /pictrs volume fills up too much, I will have to connect a cloud disk. Rather than totally disabling image uploads (which would also mean no avatars), I'm leaning towards setting something like a 400kb limit for all uploads. This is still TBD and may wind up being unnecessary if I can find some cheap option.