Sooooo my recent mishaps with server administration are making me speed up my plans of shifting towards community-owned and -maintained hosting.

Ever since my conversation with @boris almost one year ago, I took his quote “self-hosting is selfish” as a mantra. It’s time to act accordingly.

Together with @Holly and @youjungnoh, we are putting together a group of tech-savy people who want to, respectively:

1. Learn more about system administration
2. Get their hands dirty while doing so
3. Maintain our own shared server
4. Host their own things (be them websites, projects, or services) together with comrades instead of individual infrastructure.

There are many super cool collectives that are doing this already, and we intend to draw inspiration from their work and their documentation, but we really want to do this together!

Who wants to join? Please, do reach out! I already spun up a small-ish VPS that is now hosting all my static websites. If you’d like to get involved, reach out and I would be happy to give you SSH access 🌻

We would also be very grateful if more experienced sysAds want to help us out by hosting workshops or brief classes.

We intend to meet for the first time in South Holland (but maybe virtually too) sometime during the first two weeks of March.

Next steps:

1. Find a name for this group/server/mission
2. Plan a series of (free, open) intro lessons with guests
3. Start hosting some things
4. Migrate things I am already hosting with YunoHost in our community server
5. Migrate to a physical device in a home of ours?

EDIT: I forgot to add this, but it goes without saying that ours would be a queer and transfeminist server

#communityHosting #Linux #sysAd #systemAdministration #selfHosting #YunoHost #Nginx #hosting #server #VPS

RE: https://pan.rent/@tommi/116070316195477370

Server down

I admit defeat.

#Nebuchadnezzar, the #YunoHost-powered server I am the admin of, is broken and is not coming back up soon. I spent the whole day trying to restore a backup, but I failed miserably, so far.

I made a mess, and I broke things I should have never touched in the first place. No one else to blame but my stupid upgrade impulses.

Cross your fingers, send positive energy and #sysad wisdom my way.

Update: I managed to get everything back up 😥

My website is probably down, my server is broken because yesterday out of the blue I decided to upgrade to the major @yunohost beta even though it was the last thing I was supposed to be doing. WHYYY do I have to follow this impulses doomed to faaail?

I made a mess and now I am stuck 🫠

Any help is welcome, I also accept commiseration if there is no other choice 😩

What I believe has happened is that I updated dependencies to Debian Trixie but the system and YunoHost are still in Bookworm, but I can’t really say 🤔

I wrote about it here. Tons of gratitude to anyone who will decide do spend a tiny bit of their weekend helping me 💕

#Debian #Trixie #Bookworm #YunoHost #help #sysad #systemAdministration #Linux #apt

In today’s prototyping class at @xpub we have been looking at Nginx logs live.

It is CRAZY to see the actual amount of bot connecting to our website and our wiki 😱🤬

I decided not to use any analytics on my website a while ago already, but I am wondering if it exist an Internet traffic measurement tool based exclusively on information from Nginx logs?

I would gladly prefer something simple that stays in the terminal, but I would not mind installing something that can be also publicly accessible (like Grafana).

#sysAd #XPUB #Nginx #analytics #traffic #Web #WebDev

It has been nagging me a lot, but I finally decided to shut down my Pixelfed server.

There are several reasons. Here are the ones off the top of my mind.

• Pixelfed governance is unclear and its maintenance is spotty and obscure. The project has no clear roadmap and it all feels very off. Even though I was enthusiastic about @PixelfedGlitch, it still seems like this fork is not attracting enough interest and participation to establish a forward-looking plan.
• Beyond governance, I share these concerns.
• I don’t want to maintain a whole instance merely for a single profile—especially after it has been inactive for a long while. Friends and folks who are curious and interested in exploring the Fediverse are welcome to join pan.rent, that is a collective, communal, and cosy instance.
• I am having trouble with the pixelfed_ynh package for YunoHost. PHP dependencies are a mess and services constantly fail. I believe it’s not the fault of YunoHost packaging, but I am no expert, just a feeling. No energy and not worth figuring it out. I tried for a while, I gave up.
• I am generally against the idea of having multiple Fediverse accounts on multiple servers for different uses. Instead, I believe we should improve filtering and sorting posts depending on their type, and having one single account linked to one identity. Overall, Mastodon Glitch Edition does the job for my occasional image and video posting, even if it’s not optimal.
• I want to use the domain https://tmi.pics for a different purpose, probably an Immich server.

Now, a question for all the sysads out there: what are the best practices you recommend before shutting the server down? I have a strong emotional attachment to the ~15 pictures and posts I have on my profile there.

What I am doing, so far:

• saving all Web pages of profiles and posts on the Wayback Machine
• performing and archiving a YunoHost backup of the application
• ?

#Pixelfed #YunoHost #Fediverse #PixelfedAdmin #admin #FediAdmin #sysAd #systemAdministration #sysAdmin

I am powering up my self-assembled NAS for the first time and, of course, it is not working. I am panicking because I cannot return any of the components I am using… 🤯

The absolute first time I powered it up, it stayed on but the HDMI did not output anything, so I brutally unplugged the power (I am starting to regret I did this), and connected a USB with a Proxmox image on it.

Now, every time I plug in the power supply, the NAS powers for one second, than shuts off for two seconds, then it tries to boot again… It goes like this on and on and on…

Any tips to troubleshoot this?

Here are the components I am using:

• Case: Jonsbo N3
• 6× SATA 6 cables
• PSU: Chieftec CSN-450C 450W SFX 80 Plus Gold
• Topton N18 + Intel N150
• 2× RAM 16GB DDR5
• 2× HDD Seagate Ironwolf NAS 10TB
• UPS: BlueWalker Power Basic VI 1000 STL

#help #NAS #selfHosting #Proxmox #sysAd #homelab #Linux #VM #virtualMachine #grub #boot #bootloop #aiuto #MastoAiuto #MastoHelp #support #techSupport

Using email on the same domain on a Ghost installation on YunoHost

https://postcrescita.it is a wonderful #Ghost website curated by @ceci+comrades. It’s hosted on my community #server, powered by @yunohost.

How can I provide them one or more #email addresses using @postcrescita.it, that they can regularly use through a mail client, without compromising Ghost’s (required) email functionality?

Here is the related thread on the YunoHost forum.

#YunoHost #sysAd #systemAdministration #mailServer #help #mastoAiuto #Linux

feliz Día Internacional del Sysad!
que los bytes se porten bien hoy con todos nosotros, estos seres denostados e imprescindibles.
#sysad #sysadmin #administradordesistemas

Server monitoring 101

I have been running a @yunohost server for ~5 years now, but there is one question I have never been able to answer: how loaded is my server? 👀

I know, I am a terrible sysad (actually, I am not a sysad, at all), because I have no idea how to determine:

• if my server is running smoothly
• if the server is under stress, and why
• what applications are the heaviest
• if there is the possibility of installing more apps
• when peaks of stress are happening and what is causing them

In general, I would like to understand the fundamentals of server monitoring: what are the most critical metrics and what do they mean? What parameters do I have to keep an eye on?

I installed Prometheus and Grafana, but then I realized I have absolutely no idea what to do next… Do you have any suggestions?

I thought about watching some video tutorials, but I would not really know how they would relate to YunoHost installations.

Please, if possible reply in this thread of the YunoHost forum, so that we can keep track of this useful information also for others in the future. 🌻

Once I will have learned the basics, I would be very happy to write some pointers about this in the documentation, or an essential YunoHost Monitoring tutorial.

#sysAd #YunoHost #askFedi #help #systemAdministration #serverMonitoring #server #selfHosting #selfHost #Linux

Is sysad.org down or is it just me? #fediverse #sysad

anyone knows about?

#sysad #serverdown

What a great idea to update TMI Pics the #Pixelfed instance on my #YunoHost server right now, at the end of #FOSDEM25, as if I don’t have any more urgent things to do or places to be… Never trust me as your #sysad, please!

@yunohost

#systemAdministration #FOSDEM #FOSDEM2025 #TMIpics #TMI

Hi #tech #mastofriends I am trying to block some websites modifying the #Debian hosts file.

I wonder if I create a cronjob that replaces that files at 8:00 am, the job takes place even though my son uses his laptop at 10:00?

Waiting for clarifications, thanks! :flan_beg:

#Linux #sysad #systemadmin

Using sshd ? Annoyed by brute-force attempts which do nothing but increase load and thus increasing energy consumption? Solution: http://www.fail2ban.org/ #sysad #sshd #fail2ban