Hi,

There's recently been some downtime on Compuverse and I apologise for this.

The host machine was down for a while, and I was unable to bring it back online, no data was lost, it was just shut down and unable to be started.

I'm aiming to create a fail-over solution to allow for an easy transition to a secondary server should the primary fail but currently lack the time and resources required to implement such a thing.

The downtime was excessive and inexcusable so I hope to get things in a much better state as soon as I can.

Thanks & regards,

Cameron

TLDR;

CompuVerse was unaffected by this issue, as we did not have any custom emoji.

Your accounts are safe, and no information has been leaked from this instance.

Long-Form

It's recently been brought to my attention that Lemmy had a bug in regarding the handling of custom emoji. More information can be found at this link, however the key takeaways are that the exploit relied on custom emoji. CompuVerse does not have (and has not had) any custom emoji. So thankfully our instance has been unaffected.

Out of an abundance of caution, I have rotated the JWT secret, so if you needed to login again, this is why, and I apologise for the inconvenience!

Custom emoji which were federated over from other servers apparently do not cause the same issue, so we are safe on this front also.

I have also updated the instance to the latest available version of Lemmy to patch the bug properly.

Unfortunately, this has the side effect of breaking our custom CSS theme, so I have reset to the default theme for the time being. I am working on updating the theme to suit as we speak.

So, as a quick recap:

• CompuVerse was unaffected by this issue
• We have rotated JWT secrets as a precaution
• We have updated the instance to a version with this security flaw removed
• The update has broken the custom CSS theme. I am working on updating this as quickly as I can!

Hey all!

I can confirm that update was performed yesterday to 0.19.0 yesterday / today.

Unfortunately we hit some issues during the upgrade, but these have now been resolved and CompuVerse is now running 0.19.0.

I have also put provisions in place to allow for better longevity in terms of disk usage. Meaning we should now be able to operate off of the current amount of storage for much longer!

As part of this upgrade, I have also now setup a Matrix instance.

We now have a Matrix homeserver running on https://conduit.compuverse.uk (powered by Conduit)

We also have our own hosted instance of Cinny for a ready-to-go Matrix client if you don't already have one you like to use! You can access this on https://chat.compuverse.uk

As per the suggestions from @ButtonMcLemming@compuverse.uk , I plan to use this space to keep everyone up to date in case of any downtime!

The Matrix server is hosted on a completely different server, and thus should be resilient to failing at the same time as the Lemmy instance.

Thanks, Cameron

I'm thinking it would be a good idea, since people using Matrix clients like Element can join it for announcements, chat, and as a fallback if the Lemmy instance suffers from downtime.

Also, the space can also help ensure that instance updates be carried out more easily through improved ease of information access through announcements. Lemmy instance version 0.19.0 has been available since December 15, 2023, and hopefully, preparations can be made for the instance to proceed with the upgrade.

From, ButtonMcLemming

Hi, first I want to thank you for this instance.

Compuverse.uk seemed to be down for me for multiple weeks, since somewhere at the beginning of October/end of September.

I was getting no server answers from a cloudflare page.

Now I randomly checked the instance, and it's back up. Not sure from when.

Was there an issue with a cloudflare configuration or something else?

There have for some time been around four pinned posts on the instance, which have to be scrolled past when browsing. I'm suggesting limiting them to one or two when something special is happening, and only keeping them as long as necessary.

Maybe one could put the info in the sidebar or some other place? It could get rather long, but better to have it there when you are actively looking for it than in your feed every time.

Hi all, as a result of the recent disk space issue, I have moved the PostgreSQL database onto a secondary server.

This does now mean that database calls are being made "over the wire" so to speak, so performance may be slightly lower than previously. But the server which is running the PSQL database is a rather beefy dedicated server, with much more storage space available.

Hopefully performance isn't impacted too badly. But if you do notice any particularly bad performance, please do let me know and I'll see what I can do.

This new server should last us for MUCH longer (with about 6 times the storage space available).

Firstly, I really do apologise! CompuVerse has been down for a number of hours now, and I'm really sorry.

I'll be 100% transparent on this, the server ran out of disk space! This sent it into a sort of "safe mode", which unfortunately took down CompuVerse.

I have migrated all image storage over to an external server with a large amount more storage.

However, even with this, just the text content and metadata for CompuVerse is still rather large.

I'm going to investigate solutions but am averse to running a DB server over mounted storage as this is very susceptible to latency and speeds.

By my approximations we have around 2 months' worth of disk space remaining now that Pictrs is removed. I'm looking for solutions in the meantime that will balance performance and cost effectively.

Edit: The PostgreSQL database has been moved. Please read https://compuverse.uk/post/277751 for more info.