Update 21:00 CEST: all services that had their home on this host have been moved and launched.

Update 20:30 CEST: the linux container was launched on the new host. It is possible that some of you still cache the old IP address. Please be patient.

tl;dr Surprise maintenance! It looks like it is once again time for some fresh hardware. Within the next hours (perhaps also tomorrow, depending on time among other things), you might experience a downtime of up to one to two hours due to Lemmy being moved to a new machine.

This is needed for more future proofing as well as making sure the current hardware is not about to die and forcing us to apply a backup.

This post will be updated as soon as there are any updates.

Old specs (about € 37.72 /month):

• i7-7700 CPU @ 3.60GHz
• 2x512 GB KXG50ZNV512G TOSHIBA Gen 3 in Software Raid
• 4x RAM 16384 MB DDR4
• 🇫🇮

Expected new specs (€ 76,16 € /month):

• Ryzen 7 7700
• 2x1 TB SAMSUNG MZVL21T0HCLR-00B00 (not that i was given a choice) Gen 4 in Software Raid
• 64 GB RAM
• 🇩🇪 (they would be few eur cheaper in helsinki but AX52 are out of stock)

Additional costs are involved – if in your budget and if you want to support this instance, feel welcome to donate at https://tchncs.de/donate :)

Right now. both of the servers drives report 255% used. I have already received this machine in the unluckly state of equally (and much) used NVMe's... and there is some promising iowait going on, making me worry.

It's not just the very unfortunate and (as i had to learn by actually losing drives upon reboot) dangerous state of the drives, but also the fact that the i7-7700 seems a bit overwhelmed with the load from Lemmy and Firefish.

Another thing I am not (yet) sure about is whether the 64G memory are actually sufficient...

Total virtual memory: 61.74% - 38.6 GiB of 62.6 GiB
RAM: 61.74% - 38.6 GiB of 62.6 GiB
Committed: 65.29% - 40.9 GiB of 62.6 GiB virtual memory
Commit Limit: 50.00% - 31.3 GiB of 62.6 GiB virtual memory
Shared memory: 17.05% - 10.7 GiB of 62.6 GiB RAM
Page tables: 3.15% - 1.97 GiB of 62.6 GiB RAM
Disk Writeback: <0.01% - 2.42 MiB of 62.6 GiB RAM
RAM available: 20.10% free - 12.6 GiB of 62.6 GiB
Hardware Corrupted: 0% - 0 B of 62.6 GiB RAM

This is fine'ish but not sure for how long. Maybe for now I wait with upgrading the memory... – on the other hand... why not give some room for even more database tweaking perhaps?

We are sorry but the generation of your export archive has failed:

The specified bucket does not exist: user-exports

Please contact your administrator if the problem occurs again.

This is an export on https://tube.tchncs.de/my-account/import-export without video data. It fails immediately.

Please add that bucket so I can export my user data.

I've noticed the site loading slowly for the past few days. Wondering if there's something going on with the instance.

Edit: also getting a 504 Gateway Timeout error sometimes.

Hello, I am new to this forum community and very excited to get involved ! I am looking forward to contributing and learning from the community. Could someone guide me in the right direction for where to start? Are there any specific threads; resource ; areas of the forum that you would recommend for a newcomer? Any advice on how to get the most out of this forum would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance for your help!

I have read in the TOS for the Matrix server that all messages are deleted after one year. If I am talking with someone, does that mean that messages that are older than a year are deleted on my side, or both sides of the conversation? What if the chat is E2EE? If I am using a device that is signed in and has seen old messages, are they removed from that device too?

I’m thinking of moving to tchncs on mastodon (moving from floss.social) because for me floss.social limits some big instances a bit too much, causing me to be unable to see a lot of replies and posts.

Is there a way for me to check which instances tchncs has “limited”?

Limited is different from blocked. You can still follow users from limited instances and open their posts. They just won’t appear in trending or in replies.

Thanks in advance and thanks for the great lemmy instance! :)

Well hello there, I hope you are having a good time and that apart from the shaky recent update, discuss.tchncs.de serves you well! 🚀

tl;dr

tchncs is doing wonderfully in terms of donations, but I have reason to worry about an ongoing decline. Please don't feel pressured but if some of you would help looking out that it doesn't fall below a certain threshold, that'd be amazing. :)

Many of you are already using tchncs services elsewhere, but for those of you who are new, I'd like to briefly mention that this service is powered by donations of its users. By donating a small monthly fee, you ensure that I will be able to keep paying for the infrastructure and its upgrades, as well as investing my time, trying to keep the thing rolling.

Donating is 100% voluntary and not each and every one of you need to do it – also for now, there is no critical need for new donors.

If that's the case, why am I even pointing this out?

For a couple of months, our dear Elon (and later /u/spez) gave us not only waves of new users, but also motivated them / existing users to boost donations quite a bit. In fact, it is kinda unreal how much you kind people have donated to tchncs over the time.

The server-costs have increased and unlikely will go down soon again. Even tho it happened before, the past month was quite weak compared to the previous trend. Of course it is still much more than many most fediverse admins sadly have to deal with(!), but also this month started weaker than usual and I worry that this time it might become a new trend.

At tchncs.de/donate, I give you (maybe too) deep insights about the tchncs funding situation. Here you have what I just wrote as a screenshot:

::: spoiler 🖼 very bright for darktheme screenshot of the previous months in donations 🖼
Screenshot from july 12, 2024 :::

There is also tracked workhours on the site and together they even form dynamic goals with some hacky bash scripts. 😁

So what do I ask for?!

If, and only if you can afford it and if you really want to, please consider checking from time to time as to whether tchncs currently achieves goal #1 and ideally goal #2 (hw upgrades). It is important to keep a buffer for new hardware. And if not needed for new hardware, you are helping your fellow admin (me) with day to day expenses and ideally, savings for bad times.

...so that's all, this got longer than anticipated, sorry for that. Please do not feel pressured, as of now it's all fine. Just trying to make sure it stays this way. ✌