nerd stuff

On monday my Mastodon server acted up. I noticed that images were not properly loading but only displaying a blurry preview. But not all of them, just some. I suspected issues with the Object Storage Provider IONOS that I had recently configured.

After some digging I found out that my host couldn’t resolve DNS names anymore. Somehow the resolver died. So I rebooted the whole machine … not remembering that I had unfinished business in /etc/fstab which shadow mounted my home directory causing new weird issues …

In the wake of blaming the external object storage provider I had started looking into open-source alternatives. Like open-source software to set up a self-hosted S3-compatible object store. Stumbled over minio.io and quickly did a test installation on one of my machines at home.

After fixing all the issue on my server and finishing the setup of minio, I was ready to test it on some real live services: my personal Pixelfed instance. Since I’m the only user on that one, I considered it a safe playground. After a few rounds of trail and error (Pixelfed documentation still gives me the shivers) I’ve got the configuration right and test postings worked as expected.

Ready for prime time

I had configured my Mastodon instance at https://hub.uckermark.social/ to use external object storage provider for media content. The reason is, that Mastodon caches all the media in posts it federates. This can grow to several gigabytes very quickly. The more users on remote instances you local users follow, the more content the Mastodon instance will cache.

I followed the article of Thomas Leister, admin of the Mastodon instance https://metalhead.club/ to configure the S3 compatible storage from IONOS. While that technically worked out, I wasn’t really happy with the IONOS administration interface. They currently do not show any metrics for the object storage nor the data transfer. That means, flying blind for using their service until the invoice arrives. They claimed to have a billing API where the data is supposedly available. I had a brief look at it and decided that I’m too lazy to go that route.

So when IONOS issued the warning, that my trial period will run out in a few days I have decided to switch also my Mastodon instance to my self-hosted object storage backed by Minio. I copied over the existing data from IONOS object storage using the Minio Command Client. That is really comfortable.

I’ve also hooked up my minio server to Prometheus and Grafana for insights into the usage

Sports

To fight some of the kilos and the rust in general I’ll try to move more. Started that pledge with a run on Sunday. Wanted to start light with maybe 5 km to get back into it. Of course I overdid it with 10.99 km. Payed the price with sore muscles for 2 days.

While our weekly swim in the lake doesn’t count as much moving maybe, we still did it and I spent 3:12 min in the water. I’m heavily cursing at myself and the world when getting into the water. That part doesn’t get easier. But after 3 strokes of swimming thats forgotten and all that remains is the good feeling of beating oneself.

On Wednesday I finally sorted out my access to our office Gym and hit the rowing machine for 30 min and 7 km.

Friday another short round of running with 6.1 km.

For the coming week I found a partner to run hopefully more regular again here in Berlin at home. Lets see how that pans out.

Reading

Almost done with “The Dark Forest” by Cixin Liu. Memorable quote

The historical facts of the Middle Ages and the Great Ravine prove that a totalitarian system is the greatest barrier to human progress. Starship Earth requires vibrant new ideas and innovation, and this can only be accomplished through the establishment of a society that fully respects freedom and individuality.

The Dark Forest – Cixin Liu

Warp

In den vergangenen Wochen hatte ich mal Warp als Terminal getestet. Dafür gabs Einladungen und man musste sich da irgendwie für die Beta Anmelden. Anfangs sah das auch alles ganz schick aus, aber mir kam es schon gleich etwas komisch vor, dass da so ein Hype mit Einladung und künstlicher Verknappung gemacht wurde. Dann vielen mir einige Settings auf, die ich auch nicht mag. Z.B. das Warp als SSH-client eine eigene Implementierung nutzt, damit es im Output seine Blocks verwenden kann. Heißt für mich, das mein ganzer SSH-Traffic durch einen SSH-Client geht von einer Firma bei der noch nicht wirklich klar ist, welche Absichten sie hat.

Jedenfalls bin ich erst einmal wieder zurück zu iTerm2. Da weiß ich was ich hab 😉 Warp werde ich dennoch weiter aus dem Augenwinkel beobachten.

Searchtodon

Jan Lehnardt apparently had too much spare time over the holidays. So he did what Janl does and created a search engine for ones own Mastodon timeline: Searchtodon

This is based on the free Elk browser interface for Mastodon