I did a lot of tweaking and then a lot of untweaking to social.k.o database and elixir backends this morning. Hopefully, this had a net positive result -- many queries are a lot faster now.

Sorry if you had a rough ride in the past few hours. #meta

Desire to switch to akkoma increasing.

Apparently, running some of the "database maintenance tasks" can seriously peg pleroma's database backend. I think I managed to fix most of the problems that caused. Sorry if you've been getting 500 errors.

I didn't end up releasing b4-0.11 today, since I ended up rewriting some hurky code in it and it needs to go for another round of testing.

Hopefully, 0.11 will be out on Tuesday.

#b4

Sometimes you write a piece of code that is "hacky," but kinda clever. Well done.

Other times, you write a piece of code that is both a nasty hack and really quite terrible to look at. That code isn't just hacky, it's downright "hurky." It's called that, because that's the sound you make at the back of your throat when you look at it.

I may be the only person who says "hurky," but now you can start saying that, too.

You're welcome.

(Hopefully in the context of fixing hurky code, not writing it.)

@toke let me know if the changes I pushed to the config helped at all.

b4 v0.11 should be out by the end of the week. There are improvements and new features for both maintainers and contributors, so if you're a regular user of b4, I would appreciate if you try the latest master.

https://lore.kernel.org/tools/20221206215340.556ov3bdfyf3qvyy@meerkat.local/

Okay, so let me tell you about my doorbell, from a #networking perspective.

When you push the button by the door, it sends a message over the #zigbee wireless mesh network in my house. It probably goes through a few hops, getting relayed along the way by the various Zigbee light switches and "smart outlets" I have.

Once it makes it to my utility closet, it's received by a Zigbee-to-USB dongle, through a USB hub (a simple tree network) plugged into an SFF PC. From there, it gets fed into zigbee2mqtt, which, as the name implies, publishes it to my local #mqtt broker.

The mqtt broker is in the small #kubernetes cluster of #raspberrypi nodes I run in my utility closet. To get in (via a couple of #ethernet switch hops), it goes through #metallb, which is basically a proxy-ARP type service that advertises the IP address for the mqtt endpoint to the rest of my network, then passes the traffic to the appropriate container via a #linux veth device.

I have #HomeAssistant, running in the same Kubernetes cluster, subscribed to these events. Within Kubernetes, the message goes through the CNI plugin that I use, #flannel. If the message has to pass between hosts, Flannel encapsulates it in VXLAN, so that it can be directed to the correct veth on the destination host.

Because I like #NodeRed for automation tasks more than HomeAssistant, your press of the doorbell takes another hop within the Kubernetes cluster (via a REST call) so that NodeRed can decide whether it's within the time of day I want the doorbell to ring, etc. If we're all good, NodeRed publishes an mqtt message (more VXLANs, veths, etc.)

(Oh and it also sends a notification to my phone, which means another trip through the HomeAssistant container, and leaving my home network involves another soup of acronyms including VLANs, PoE, QoS, PPPoE, NAT or IPv6, DoH, and GPON. And maybe it goes over 5G depending on where my phone is.)

Of course something's got to actually make the "ding dong" sound, and that's another Raspberry Pi that sits on top of my grandmother clock. So to get *there* the message hops through a couple Ethernet switches and my home WiFi, where it gets received by a little custom daemon I wrote that plays the sound via an attached #HiFiBerry board. Oh but wait! We're not quite done with networking, because the sound gets played through PulseAudio, which is done through a UNIX domain socket.

SO ANYWAY, that's why my doorbell rarely works and why you've been standing outside in the snow for five minutes.

I hate it when I implement something and then immediately think of a better way to do it.

#b4

Periodic reminder not to set your system hostname to "linux.com". I really don't want to see your cPanel alerts.

.plan files + finger = the original microblogging platform

Me: I just want to send this 8bit message, k?
SMTP Elder Gods: Repent, ye puny mortal.

Today is brought to you by an annoying email header corrupting bug in Python:
https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/99927

Before you ask, we'll be moving things over to RHEL 9 Very Soon Now (TM). It just required a lot of yaks to be shaved, and thankfully most of them are now looking pretty smooth. And likely very cold, because there's probably a good reason why yaks need all that fur.

If you're wondering why you can't follow society.oftrolls.com accounts from social.k.o, it's because we can't actually talk to them -- we can only do TLS1.2 maximum due to still being on RHEL7 for a little while longer, and they only allow TLS1.3.

Oh, hey, Akkoma mentioned in the LWN write-up. Nice.

https://lwn.net/Articles/916154/

So, who here still uses Flickr a lot?

My plan is to migrate my personal instance (castoranxieux.ca) to Akkoma some time this week. Should be fun, and I'm liking the concept of bubbles.

I know that Pleroma upstream has had... interesting times in the past few months, but I didn't want to go with a fork for social.k.o -- at least not yet. We'll see how Akkoma and re:Based are doing over the next few months, and how the upstream is doing. Switching my personal instance to Akkoma seems to be the right way go to in terms of kicking tires.