The Sunny Gardener - January 2024
Hardware Upgrade
Early in the month some users had mentioned they were seeing timeout errors when uploading images, which appeared to be due to the load on the server. A small configuration change at the time helped somewhat, but over the next week or so it became more clear that we were hitting the limits of the server’s capacity.
The previous upgrade – to 4 CPUs and 8 GB RAM – was in Nov. 2022 during the big influx from Twitter, and while there aren’t so many more active local users now than at that time, overall Fediverse activity has increased substantially since then, and the server’s CPU in particular has been hitting its limit recently.
I began setting up a new server with 8 CPUs and 16 GB RAM, and the switch over was completed on Feb 2. Everything appears to be running much more smoothly now – as expected – and hopefully this upgrade will tide us over for the next year or so.
Mastodon Security Patch
The Mastodon project announced they would be releasing a critical security patch on Feb. 1, and sunny.garden applied this patch as soon as it was available.
The summary of the vulnerability titled Remote user impersonation and takeover is:
Due to insufficient origin validation in all Mastodon, attackers can impersonate and take over any remote account.
which certainly sounds less than desirable. More details are planned to be released in a couple of weeks to give servers more time to upgrade.
Summary
Activity levels still continuing a gradual upward trend.
We’re back to our usual low report count without any spam waves this month.
Hosting Costs
Due to the newly upgraded main server, the expected costs on the next bill forward will be increased by about $30 CAD.
Expand Hosting Costs
| sunny.garden | 2024-02-01 | |
|---|---|---|
| Main Server | 4-8GB-160GB | -$36 |
| Media Storage | 322GB/mo. | -$12 |
| Media Bandwidth | Free | $0 |
| Backups | 95GB/mo. | -$17 |
| Domain Name | $35/yr | -$3 |
| Email Server | -$5 | |
| Donations One-Time | $20 | |
| Donations Recurring | $45 | |
| Monthly Totals | ||
| Previous Balance | $109 | |
| Total Expenses | -$73 | |
| Total Donations | $65 | |
| Balance | $101 |
Canadian Dollars
As always, thank you to everyone that has donated on ko-fi, and to those who have recently added new contributions to support the upgraded server!
There’s no obligation or expectation that you donate in order to use the server, and I’m still able to cover any shortfall myself if needed.
– Brook