An average guy's IT (mis)adventures

Several months ago I was running a "matrix-docker-ansible" playbook on OVH, but limited resources led me to take it down.

More than one time I thought about reliving that server (which I have backups of), but reading on the changes that the playbook got so far and the difficulties in running a Matrix environment without exposing web ports (80 and 443), I thought to better give up.

Yesterday I looked into Dendrite (a Matrix server written in GO), which looks a lot simpler than the whole lot the docker-ansible playbook offers, so I went ahead and installed it the manual way with nginx as reverse proxy. Easy peasy - documentation is quite good.

Today I also installed "Cinny" as a web client and I'm done for the moment... Federation works, registrations are closed (can invite friends though) and apart from RAM peaks and quite long waiting times when joining rooms (up to 2K members), the server is doing quite well: started with 700MB of RAM (at joining time) and went down to less than 300 in normal usage. CPU gets high spikes when sending messages but other than that is just a few points %. Just don't even think to join the official #matrix room or shit will happen 😀

My new Matrix username is: @roughnecks:woodpeckersnest.space, feel free to add me.

Here are a few tweaks that make my "converse.js" experience better:

Remove link from banner: I accidentally used to click that and be teleported to converse.js official webclient, so I thought it could be misleading for unaware users using my locally hosted version of the software.

Search and replace/remove the href bit in converse.min.js, under the dist directory:

<a class="brand-heading" href="https://conversejs.org" target="_blank" rel="noopener">

In the "converse.min.css" file, search for this string and fill it with the following code to have unread MUCs underlined and colored in red:

.list-item.unread-msgs

.list-item.unread-msgs{font-weight:700; text-decoration: underline red;}

Fix color for toolbar-utilities when in 1:1 chats: find this line in "converse.min.css"

.fas:hover svg{fill:var(--chat-head-color)}

and replace with:

.fas:hover svg{fill:var(--chat-toolbar-btn-color)}

Raise minimum chat text area: find this bit in "converse.min.css"

min-height:var(--chat-textarea-height);

and replace with custom value in pixels, e.g.

min-height:120px;

Set a smaller line height for chats list: find the first occurrence of this code in "converse.min.css"

.conversejs .items-list .list-item

and continue until you find:

height:2.5em

substitute it with something like height:2.0em

Removing a space in quoted reply for "actions" plugin: find the following string in your conversejs/dist/plugins/actions/action.js

return ">" + nick + ' : '

remove the offending space

return ">" + nick + ': '

Changing from :smiley: to :thumbsup: emoji for the "Like" actions plugin function: find the following string in your conversejs/dist/plugins/actions/action.js

actions_reactions: [
                                    {name: 'like', label: 'Like', emoji: ':smiley:', icon_class: 'fa fa-check'},

and replace with:

actions_reactions: [
                                    {name: 'like', label: 'Like', emoji: ':thumbsup:', icon_class: 'fa fa-check'},

Today I wanted to install yet another web frontend for the services I host, i.e. mumble-web

mumble-web is an HTML5 Mumble client for use in modern browsers.

I won't bore you with the install details, just know that it's basically JS and you need to install npm modules.. After some processing and a whole lot of deprecation warnings on screen, it finally failed. Then I looked at the logs it left and it was searching for python2!! Went back to the github page and found out the code is from about 3 years ago, with the latest issue being about one guy managing to build the software on Debian 11 with some old NodeJs version..

So, after a bit of disappointment, I delete the whole directory and be done with it. You know, there's no alternatives out there 😟

Now I would like to ask a question to disroot admins: how the hell are you running this junk on your server!? I believe they're using docker, still it's not safe in my opinion to run such old-unmaintained stuff.

I won't be doing that.