A website of mine was getting thickly attacked by bots. This has become even worse than in the last few months. My Monthly Network Transfer limits were under threat to be exceeded, at my cloud hosting provider. So I installed Anubis to protect my site. After only one day of use of Anubis, the volume of traffic to my site all of a sudden reduced by about 40%. Anubis can be quite tricky to install.

I’ve got copyparty working behind a proper reverse proxy. This allows it to be publicly accessed using a nice domain name with SSL. A reverse proxy (on a cloud VPS) re-directs the https traffic into my home lab where Copyparty is running on a Raspberry Pi 4: Some geek friends of mine did some stress testing all at once on this Copyparty server. It could take a savage, nasty beating and survive.

I’ve had to abandon a backup drive, where a strange thing happened. After extensive testing, narrowing down where the problem was, an “fsck.ext4 -a” couldn’t detect a subtle, deeper issue. To detect the issue was brutally difficult, because the drive also got clean bill of health from “smartctl”. I reformatted it to BTRFS, to afford me scrubbing. It was only during a scrub that I could see the deeper issue - a massive slowdown in scrub speed partway through the scrub.

…an opinionated ‘Cheat Sheet’ to a fast Linux install of Flarum

Dear fellow or potential fellow gotosocial instance admins, I’ve come up with a novel way to set up a gotosocial server behind a reverse proxy, which avoids the use of making new firewalling rules - both on a VPS, and creating port forwarding on one’s home router. This method is ideal for minimizing the cost of running one’s own ActivityPub/Mastodon server, in a way that leverages inexpensive fast storage on the backend (say, on a RaspberryPi 5, 2GB of RAM, with an NVMe).