r00ty

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 look. That roundabout is still there. But, sadly it is now concrete and not grass in the middle…

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.

Look kids, big ben! Parliament!

Definitely looks like ice in there. I would wager juice or traditional cider.

Oh and quite some ales wouldn’t have a head and would look cloudy like that. But I believe anyone serving such ales would at best ban you from the establishment if you asked for ice in it.

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.

It’s an old expression, but it checks out.

Source: Somewhat old(ish) person from the UK.

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.

It’s good to see. The UK one is still ticking upward too (133.5k/100k). It’s been an impressive last minute push.

Now, we wait and see I guess. I expect nothing useful to come from the UK one, but at least we force them to respond again. Even if it is the same response.

The EU one, I really do hope something comes of it.

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

Completely agree. It should not deter anyone.

They didn’t close it. They provided an answer early. That as they see it, existing trade and consumer law should cover games and they don’t plan on carving out extra legislation for it but they will “keep an eye on it”.

Now it is over 100k, it doesn’t actually mean anything more than they “might” debate it in parliament.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I signed the petition, and I think they SHOULD look into it. But, my old cynical bones tell me that even if they do have a debate in parliament. It will be at a time when there will be 5 MPs in there, who will have nothing to say on the matter and it will be swept under the rug with a further canned statement drawn up by some civil servant in whitehall talking about consumer law just like the statement before.

Most western governments are on the side of industry, and that includes game developers. I cannot imagine they care about this subject and will do the bare minimum lip service to move past it.

I hope I’m wrong.

I do have a bit more hope for the European parliament. Just a little. They do seem to be a bit more pro-consumer. That is the one that matters most IMO.

Well inflation IS bad, and at least here is outstripping pay increases for most people.

But those burrito private taxis are probably one of the few things going up in price more slowly than, you know things you actually need.