r00ty

I think the problem is, to businesses it is very much comparable. Businesses only ever (and don’t listen to anything they say, that’s all a lie) think about short term revenue gains. If they actually ever planned ahead you’d not have the month end, quarter end and year end revenue panics that seemingly every medium to large organization has.

So, being able to make decent looking software fast, is actually way more useful to them than it being “good” long term.

My only hope at this point, is people doing software engineering for as many years as I have can now create “Artisan software” as an art piece or something and get rich from it. :P

That is very likely what they will do, I’m certain of it. Probably worse than that. I bet they will allow VPNs to licensed users (businesses), they will require specific protocols where they are able to backdoor in and snoop if they want to.

This isn’t a good road we’re going down right now.

Yeah I wonder if they’re A/B testing on some accounts and old.reddit is generally the last to feel changes.

I thought I’d reply to this with an update. Because, I saw how far the free tier goes, and it’s pretty far.

I had another huuuuge influx of AI/other bots scraping my instance at top speed. Hundreds of requests per second, and it was putting some load on the postgres server.

What I found was, that there was a mixture of traffic. Some was coming from a handful of AS numbers (each hosting hundreds of large IP blocks) controlled by a small handful of the same names. So, those I was able to block outright by AS number.

But then I found a very large number of random requests coming in bursts (and definitely not humans) all on mobile or isp customer blocks… I assume it’s some kind of botnet being used? But they were all valid requests for posts and comments.

I looked at the custom ruleset on cloudflare and, it’s quite powerful. I settled on the following.

1: Allow known fediverse software by user agent (yes, the bots could eventually spoof these. But right now they are not). 2: Allow known instances by IP blocks 3: Allow access to the fediverse inbox specifically. Which is where most inter-instance traffic goes. 4: Allow access to LOCAL users and well known services/other standard ActivityPub urls 5: Everything else, for everyone else. Managed challenge.

The traffic just completely stopped dead. The fediverse traffic continued unfettered. But the traffic coming in was legitimate (it’s mostly me, a handful of others that is so little traffic).

All it adds, is the interstitial page with the “are you human?” checkbox that for most people automatically checks. And the user moves on fine and can interact normally with the site. So for people it’s a very minor inconvenience and it stops bot traffic completely in its tracks.

What is annoying. I could make this MUCH better with regex matches. But, not only do they not allow free accounts to use regex (I understand). But “Pro” users cannot either. It’s only for business or above… Business accounts are eye wateringly expensive for a hobbyist!

Umm. I just tried old.reddit on a “gonewild” subreddit with no login even, and it was fine. Now I’m sure they’ll patch it out. But, seems to be an easy workaround as of right now.

Oh, I forgot about Azerothcore (which is a fork from Trinitycore, and absorbed some changes from certain private server source that has been released in the past).

Which you choose I think depends on what you want.

Trinitycore has a more strict development policy of doing things properly and not for example concentrating too much on getting boss fights etc “right”. It’s more of a technical project than “ready to go private server”.

Whereas (and this is as I understand it, I’ve not done any work for the project directly) Azerothcore is a bit more lax in their requirements. Now, don’t take this to mean they accept bad code. It just means they don’t have the stricter guidelines that trinitycore have.

I could be wrong though. I’ve been out of the game for a while now.

I think so. I would consider perhaps allowing a short time without power before doing that. To handle short cuts and brownouts.

So perhaps poll once per minute, if no power for more than 5 polls trigger a shutdown. Make sure you can provide power for at least twice as long as the grace period. You could be a bit more flash and measure the battery voltage and if it drops below a certain threshold send a more urgent shutdown on another gpio. But really if the batteries are good for 20mins+ then it should be quite safe to do it on a timer.

The logic could be a bit more nuanced, to handle multiple short power cuts in succession to shorten the grace period (since the batteries could be drained somewhat). But this is all icing on the cake I would say.

I was looking at doing something similar with my Asustor NAS. That is, supply the voltage, battery, charging circuit myself, and add one of those CH347 USB boards to provide I2C/GPIO etc and just have the charging circuit also provide a voltage good signal that software on the NAS could poll and use to shut down.

My understanding is that the only issues were the write hole on power loss for raid 5/6 and rebuild failures due to un-seen damage to surviving drives.

Issues with single drive rebuild failures should be largely mitigated by regular drive surface checks and scrubbing if the filesystem supports it. This should ensure that any single drive errors that might have been masked by raid are removed and all drives contain the correct data.

The write hole itself could be entirely mitigated since the OP is building their own system. What I mean by that is that they could include a “mini UPS” to keep 12v/5v up long enough to shut down gracefully in a power loss scenario (use a GPIO for “power good” signal). Now, back in the day we had raid controllers with battery backup to hold the cache memory contents and flush it to disk on regaining power. But, those became super rare quite some time ago now. Also, hardware raid was always a problem with getting a compatible replacement if the actual controller died.

Is there another issue with raid 5/6 that I’m not aware of?

Trinitycore has a guide https://trinitycore.info/ if you follow it properly it will result in a working server. Any time I’ve seen someone have a problem following it, they either missed a step by mistake, or tried to go off on a tangent, configuring it for their own needs during install/setup.

First make it work with the instructions, and once it is working, then tinker with it :P

It’s more likely trinitycore (which forked from mangos quite some time ago). https://github.com/TrinityCore/TrinityCore/

Mangos do still have a Wrath server branch. But specifically for 3.3.5 trinitycore is more often used.

This was actually the story I had in mind when I wrote my comment. In my case, I’m using cloudflare for this mbin instance, another unrelated low traffic site, and R2 for the media on the instance. It’s so small that it will never really escape their free tier.

But yeah, if you’re doing something that is scaling up this is definitely something you need to be aware of.

There seems to be a line, so far as I can tell. If everything you need sits on the free tier, they’re really good (well tbh their R2 storage is reasonably priced too). But once you stray into needing a paid tier, it apparently (I’m not there) quickly gets expensive as you’re lured into every higher tiers.

But yes, in general I don’t mind cloudflare so much and do use their free (and R2 paid) services.

This is my assumption too. It’s disabled for me. I have no plans to change that.

Dave Williams, successfully sued for unjust termination and was returned to the service in 2006. Williams was again fired for brutality in 2009, and again reinstated.

America, we need to talk.

Wireguard vpn into my home router. Works on android so fire sticks etc can run the client.

It’s in the app list for me. I set it to disabled.

Phone is Samsung s24 ultra.

Gemini is an app, I disabled that. I also shut off the key press and there’s some other places you can turn off some of the automatic AI features, and also there’s a setting to disable the “online” AI in general.

But that’s why in another comment I said, I am still not sure I turned it all off (or even if it is possible to).

Doesn’t the motorola phone have a settings screen for defining what the button does? For Samsung they like to re-purpose the power button.

First of all, it brought up bixby. I turned it back to powering off the phone and disabled bixby.

Then, with the new update they re-assigned the power button to gemini. So, I turned it back to powering off the phone and disabled gemini too.

However, the problem these days is that I’m never completely sure I’ve turned off all of the AI nonsense on my phone.

Pretty sure I disabled Gemini as one of the first things I did when I got my phone. But, yes when I read that, to me it did seem like a serious overreach for something that was going to be “on by default” for most users.