stratself

joined 1 year ago
 

Continuwuity, the Matrix homeserver with an incredible name, has gotten a new version!

The highlight of this release is a brand new way to track remote server health, in order to recover faster from federation issues. Previously, an unreachable remote triggers a very naive retry loop with increasing timeouts (i.e. sender backoff), which by itself can present cascading problems.

Now, such a loop can be reset when the remote is detected back online (e.g. when they send something new), and any retry attempts also redo the server destination discovery instead of using potentially stale cache values. The result is better, more reliable federation recoveries, especially towards servers with dynamic IP addresses rotation.

Experimental support for Sticky Events has also been added behind an opt-in toggle. These special event types allow for efficient, ephemeral user states that can expire later, such as someone's participantship in a video call. Alongside the drafts for Delayed Events and embedded Livekit token service, it is one of the building blocks to support calling in the MatrixRTC 2.0 era.

Futhermore, various bugfixes to OAuth2-based logins, client-server syncing, and room state resolution allows for a smoother, more correct experience. The docs have also been updated in some aspect. Finally, the new version also contains a security fix in store, so please update after checking the changelogs accordingly.

Still reeling in from the June update where a third of the codebase was refactored, the homeserver's development remain steadfast as ever, despite any recent downtimes on the git forges or community rooms. The maintainer team yet again delivered with speed and excellence, so Continuwuity can be a Matrix server you can run!

[–] stratself 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Most of the software are old versions, Forgejo 7 is like years ago now. Why are you running benchmarks on these versions and not the latest ones?

[–] stratself 1 points 2 weeks ago

Continuwuity!!

[–] stratself 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I do this albeit with Tailscale. Netbird/Tailscale would act as a node of your VPN and you can configure reverse proxy routes (via tailscale serve or Netbird's equivalent) from the VPS edge to the homelab. You can even do SNI passthrough and have TLS terminated at your home, if you want, though this can be a bit slower

Alternatively you can even expose stuff via their servers. Tailscale Inc calls this service Funnels, and Netbird should have similar offerings. It's kinda like Tunnels but you gotta use their domains, so a VPS acts greater as a dedicated entrypoint.

Lastly yes you'd be exposing the service to the general public internet, so some basic security is needed. Netbird has a Crowdsec module integration, might wanna look at that one and set up rules/detections. Consider putting extra auth in front of Jellyfin, use Authelia or something with an auth screen. And only expose the stuff you need, not your internal dashboard or whatever admin UI.

[–] stratself 1 points 4 weeks ago

yeah, it's consuming. I believe a big part of this is due to Matrix's HTTP sync-polling being more expensive than simply maintaining a TCP stream (which is what XMPP does)

In fact, since XMPP syncs in the background so well, I use Conversations as a UnifiedPush backend for Matrix. You can find another article here as well

[–] stratself 8 points 4 weeks ago

Since this is a selfhosting sub can you actually explain how you're hosting it?

[–] stratself 1 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (2 children)

Hi, ntfy/another unified push backend is the third party. As in: it doesn't just go between you and your server

[–] stratself 1 points 1 month ago

I didn't know that could be possible. Clients can generally disable it, and server software like Continuwuity can also toggle it off at the server level.

Perhaps you should try with a different provider

[–] stratself 20 points 1 month ago (6 children)

Android notifications are notoriously difficult to get right. May I ask how is Nextcloud Talk currently implementing notifications? Is it through ntfy, a background service, or Google's Firebase? Have you allowed background usage for both the push app and the chat app?

I use Matrix with Continuwuity and Element X, and it's doable most of the time except for small bugs. If you disable federation, the resource usage should be minimal too. But it also requires a third party for push service which can be unreliable.

On the XMPP side, there is also Snikket which you could look into. It offers both a server (running modified Prosody) and a mobile client (modified Conversations). XMPP can run as an efficient background service on Android, so it'll receive in-band notifications.

Regardless of options, one of the main problem I'm aware of is that Android variants tend to overkill various background app, leading to missed notifications. I think it's better to debug on that aspect as well

[–] stratself 2 points 1 month ago

I don't think geoblocking would be a great fit for Matrix, since you'd be contacted by servers from all over the world. It's more suitable for something like a static website

[–] stratself 10 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

There are various technical alternatives (ActivityPub-based stuff like PixelFed/Loops/Mastodon/GotoSocial/Sharkey/Akkoma/something else on the Fediverse)

But would you take the plunge of self-discovering different content, which might as well be none of your topics of interests? Would you be acquainted of vastly different UI/UX such as the lack of recommendations, a million client frontends, and the technicality of federation? And lastly, will you find it a place with communities to socialize and content to enjoy from in the long run?

I think trying out on a public instance would be a good way to answer those questions. PixelFed most closely resembles Insta, but the other ones can do too. Then you can consider selfhosting your own

[–] stratself 3 points 1 month ago

How on earth do you have 54 release candidates, each of them adding significant feature, and not bumping your versions? Wouldn't it be nicer to just put them on the main branch and cut a semver release every now and then? At least that'll save on the frequency of posts here

 

Technitium DNS Server v15.1.0 has been released with support for OIDC! Now you can use your preferred identity provider to log in to user accounts, and manage your DHCP/DNS deployments with approriately granular permissions controls.

I've played around with it, and safe to say that the SSO integration works well. I've written a guide to set it up against Kanidm here. There were some OIDC/clustering bugs in prior v15 releases, and with v15.1.0 they have been squashed and solved.

The major release of version 15 also include various important changes, such as the following highlights:

  • A new API call for Prometheus metrics
  • Query Logs apps can now follow live updates
  • Codebase updated to .NET 10 runtime
  • HTTP tokens are now accepted via the Authorization: Bearer <token> header
  • Many other bugfixes, secfixes, and improvements...

Technitium is pretty great. Hope everyone enjoy the release :)

 

There is a recently discovered critical vulnerability that affects all Matrix homeservers of the Conduit lineage. If you're using a Rust-based Matrix server (which are basically Conduit and forks), please urgently upgrade to the following versions:

If you're not able to upgrade right now, you should urgently implement this workaround in your reverse proxy.

Attackers exploiting this flaw can arbitrarily kick any user out of a room, join rooms unauthorized on the same server, and can also ban same-server users. They effectively constitute a severe denial of service from an unauthenticated party, and it has been exploited in the wild.

 

Technitium DNS Server (TDNS) has gotten a new release with many awesome features: TOTP authentication, an upgraded .NET library, and many security and performance fixes.

But most important of all, it now supports clustering. A long-awaited feature, this allows Technitium to sync DNS zones and configurations across multiple nodes, without needing an external orchestrator like Kubernetes, or an out-of-band method to replicate underlying data. For selfhosters, this would enable resilience for many use cases, such as internal homelab adblocks or even selfhosting your public domains.

From a discussion with the developer and his sneak peek on Reddit, it is now known that the cluster is set up as a single-primary/multiple-secondary topology. They communicate via good-old REST API calls, and transported via HTTPS for on-the-wire encryption.

To sync DNS zones (i.e. domains), the primary server provisions the "catalog" of domains, for secondary ones to dynamically update records in a method known as Zone Transfers. This feature, standardized as Catalog Zones (RFC9432), were actually supported since the previous v13 release as groundwork for the current implementation.

As an interesting result, nodes can sync to a cluster's catalog zone, as well as define their own zones and even employs other catalog zones from outside the cluster. This would allow setups where, for example, some domains are shared between all nodes, and some others only between a subset of servers.

To sync the rest of the data such as blocklists, allowlists, and installed apps, the software simply sends over incremental backups to secondaries. The admin UI panel is also revamped to improve multi-node management: it now allows logging in to other cluster nodes, as well as collating some aggregated statistics for the central Dashboard. Lastly, a secondary node can be promoted to primary in case of failures, with signing keys also managed within for a seamless transition of DNSSEC signed zones.

More details about configuring clusters is to be provided in a blogpost in the upcoming days. It is important to note that this feature only supports DNS stuff, and not DHCP just yet (Technitium is also a DHCP server). This, along with DHCPv6 and auto-promotion rules for secondaries, is planned for the upcoming major release(s) later on.

As a single-person copyleft project, the growth of this absolute gem of a software has been tremendous, and can only get better from here. I personally can't wait to try it out soon

Disclaimer: I'm just a user, not the maintainer of the project. Information here may be updated for correctness and you can repost this to whatever

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submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by stratself to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
 

Hi all, I made a simple container to forward tailscale traffic towards a WireGuard interface, so that you can use your commercial VPN as an exit node. It's called tswg

https://github.com/stratself/tswg

Previously I also tried Gluetun + Tailscale like some guides suggested, but found it to be slow and the firewall too strict for direct connections. Tswg doesn't do much firewalling aside from wg-quick rules, and uses kernelspace networking which should improve performance. This enables direct connections to other Tailscale nodes too, so you can hook up with DNS apps like Pi-hole/AdguardHome.

I've shilled for this previously, but now I wanna promote with an actual post. Having tested on podman, I'd like to know if it also works on machines behind NATs and/or within Docker. Do be warned though that I'm a noob w.r.t. networking, and can't guarantee against IP leaks or other VPN-related problems. But I'd like to improve.

Let me know your thoughts and any issues encountered, and thank you all for reading

 

Hi all. Per the title, I'm looking for something that:

  • Can run as an unprivileged user inside a container

  • Allows OpenID Connect authentication for a multiuser setup

  • Doesn't take hostage of my CPU

Homarr and Dashy are featureful solutions, but they can't run unprivileged in docker. Dashy closed this issue, but in fact it's not resolved. Meanwhile Homarr does work with UID/GID env vars, but starting as root and dropping capabilities is not the same as defining user: 1234:1234 from the get-go. Furthermore, they are really heavy node apps, which kinda deter me from deploying.

I neither wanna use my reverse proxy with forward auth or having an extra oauth2-proxy container, so Organizr (using forwarded auth headers) or Homer/Homepage/bunch of static pages behind a reverse proxy is out of scope.

Feature-wise I'm just looking for a beautified link keeper, preferably with multiple dashboard mapped to different user groups (ideally it could be done via custom OAuth metadata/claims). Fancy plugins like RSS and weather are not needed, but appreciated.

With all that said (and sorry if I'm too choosy), is there a current solution that fits the bills above? My IDP's UI is quite rudimentary, but I can resort to using it as a "homepage". I wanna thank in advance for any guidance

P/S: Seems like most dashboards fall into two categories - bloated fancy apps, or dead simple frontpages. It'd be nice to have something inbetween.

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