Hello dear reader! I come to you another thousand miles away from the datacenter, to write an article to clarify some nuances around how I handle terrorist content on Pomf. Terrorist content can be defined as any video or material related to a domestic, international, extremist or other terrorist incident or organization, such as a recording of it or a propaganda video.

We're out of space folks! Come back when the Proxmox project is completed! Another 768GB of RAM is standing by!

WARNING: It's time for BORING BUSINESS TALK. Run away all ye who don't care about megacorp politics, big enterprises, or me griping about how companies prefer to feel good about getting things done more than just getting things done.

As you may be aware, the world of fiat currency is rife with identity verification, Know Your Customer (USA) laws, and various other things that reveal who you are to everyone in the world when so much as a dollar gets involved. Money makes the world go 'round, and so does your identity details.

It's been a while since I've done one of these! Hello again, dear metrics nerds. There's been a lot since November's last metrics update that I'll run through, and then all the near-term future projects I'll go over:

Updates:

Historical updates are as follows:

It occurs to me that I've never written an article on the most important foundational architecture decision I took, which is the method in which I use to publish things from my home safely and reliably.

Let's dive in. I'll try to make this one a simple article so it's more accessible to the masses. Self hosting is a good thing for anyone to do, after all, as it fights centralization!

Note: This article was last updated on August 4th, 2023.

Another project complete! This one stretched one of my weakest skills - networking.

The Problem:

So, every server previously had two network connections - one dedicated to the management network, and one dedicated to the host network. Both of these connections were 10Gbit connections, via SFP+ fiber transceivers. However, if a transceiver, cable, NIC or even the entire switch crapped out, that host was toast, because both connections needed to stay up at all times. This scenario happened twice in recent memory:

Oh boy. Where do I begin with this article. Let's start with: Happy New Year!

Okay, maybe a table of contents is a better start:

After the slice range improvement, IOWait (The amount of time the CPU is deadlocked waiting for storage calls to finish) across the four edge nodes uses for Pomf traffic went up quite a bit due to the need to address a larger amount of fragmented files across the slow storage cache disk. Before it wasn't really a problem, but now when there's over 100,000 slices to manage, it changes the IOPS requirements quite a bit.

Hello again dear reader! Pomf has continued to scale to wild heights, and so the cracks are starting to show. One such "crack" was the issue of cache refills. Read more on how I have just solved this problem, hopefully forever.