An average guy's IT (mis)adventures

I am most productive at night, when there is finally silence - apart from background music. The last couple hours of this Wednesday brought some nice additions to the @wpn support MUC:

• chat is not XMPP only anymore, but it got bridged to Matrix, via "matterbridge".
• a bot is now sending "BOFH excuses" to the chat, once a day.

XMPP MUC can be reached from: https://invite.woodpeckersnest.space/#status@chat.woodpeckersnest.space?join

Matrix room can be reached from: https://matrix.to/#/#wpn:matrix.org

Bridged chat means that everything being written in any of those rooms, gets relayed to the other by bots: there are in fact 2 bots connected to the 2 rooms, one is an XMPP bot and the other is a Matrix one, operated by "matterbridge", as I said earlier.

About "BOFH excuses", they are some fortune cookies from the relative Linux package, which are all about "Bastard Operators From Hell" excuses.. They are some short funny sentences about IT which an imaginary Operator (sysop, sysadmin, you name it) could say as excuse to justify issues.

Example?

BOFH excuse #266:
All of the packets are empty.

I have the same script running on gemini, at gemini://woodpeckersnest.space/cgi-bin/bofh

Basically it's some python spaghetti which runs the fortune command, does some formatting to the resulting text and sends it over gemini, or in the case of @wpn chat, over webhook to one other bot, which then posts its content to XMPP. It's more complicated to explain than do it 😀

P.S. @wpn support MUC is not publicly listed, so even if I'm posting links which may be used to join it, it should be treated as limited to @wpn users only.

gemlog

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.