State of Project Segfault: August + September 2024

Hello! It’s been a month since we haven’t updated you with the state of Project Segfault, we’re still doing well, it just happened that I (Midou) didn’t have much to talk about last month and preferred to start making blogposts when there is something interesting to show. This means there could be months where nothing happens and Project Segfault doesn’t need a blog post with an empty burger. With that said, we’ve made some new stuff this month, notably…

Pubnix will be remade from scratch, based off of Alpine Linux and OpenRC + s6

The Pubnix as you know of it right now is…in a very bad state, there are many reasons for it to be in this shape:

We moved pubnix to arya’s server when Soleil Levant was crumbling before our eyes and we had to get it out to avoid data corruption.
Arya’s specs aren’t as good as Soleil’s spec (Compare a 32 Cores and 320GB of ram server to a your average pc with some tools to beef it up).
Using SystemD for users was a bad idea, all of the processes kept eating at least 1 mb for each user, imagine doubling that to 300 users, that would make pubnix waste about 300mb of free memory estate.
The restrictions we’ve put to the user were…to say the very least, circumventable without the user aware of it.

This has put Pubnix in a state where it frequently shuts down (most likely killed by the hypervisor for eating too much ram), ssh connection gets killed (oomd killing every process it finds, which sshd could be affected by it). And since we I and Arya felt like it would be a nice fun (define “fun”) experience to set something up from scratch again. We went ahead and did the basics, soon Pubnix users that have joined out Matrix room (link to the Pubnix matrix) will have the choice to experiment with this new Pubnix, please be aware that many things may break, so we need you to know if we ae doing the right choice with that and if your software is going to run fine.

Invidious, Piped will be broken for the foreseeable future

YouTube have lately been ramping up the fight with Ad-Blocks + 3rd party clients (which makes Piped and Invidious also targeted by them). We have received info from the Invidious team of some changes that will be done. However we can’t tell much more than that as per their request. In our side, we can’t really do much unless we pay for a residential proxy to rotate frequently to keep catching up with YouTube, but this is way too expensive for what we currently have in our funds to be able to attempt this (psst, donating helps).

Pizza downtime in August

We had a brief downtime of Pizza (hosted at Avoro) due to them not sending emails about having to pay, so we always have a downtime due to avoro shutting the vps down, notifying to pay, and we do so and have to re-decrypt the drive after that only Midou and Arya have. Which takes time to do.