State of the Instance (January 2023)
Blast! Late again!
January 7 maintenance
The database maintenance went well, remote posts older than 2021 were deleted and the database was compacted further, freeing about 24GB of space altogether.
I've also upgraded the block storage from 128GB to 256GB, mainly so that I had more space to put files away during database operations. Now there's more than ample space for media! Parts of the database can also be moved there when the main disk is filled up again, so another purge of old posts probably won't be necessary this year.
The reason that all of this took two and half days was that I kept screwing up the operations, leading to several backup restores. Now I actually know what I'm doing, so the next time should be faster.
February ?? maintenance
There will be another maintenance soon, this time to migrate the server from CentOS to Rocky Linux, since in late 2021, the enlightened minds at Red Hat have pulled the plug on CentOS and the server didn't get any software updates in over a year now.
This should only take a few hours at most, but you'll be given a heads-up at least a day before.
Pleroma updates
After the maintenance was done, I ran a routine Pleroma update only to find a new major update on the frontend. There are features that I like, others that I don't, and a few bugs and oversights that could have been fixed. The bottom line is that a lot of things in that update caught me by suprise (and you too, I assume).
Given this update and the vast changes it caused, I'll be testing any frontend updates on temporary instances for at least a few days before I decide whether to apply the update or not. These instances will be public so that you can try out the new features before they land on Cawfee Club.
(My policy for some time has been to pull changes from the unstable develop branch, where all the new merged changes land, because of a lack of proper releases (see State of the Instance (December 2021)). This will continue, because currently, the frontend is only updated when a major release occurs.)
Operating costs
| Operating costs for January 2023 | |
|---|---|
| cawfee.club (server) | $30.00 USD |
| cawfee.club (block storage) * | $2.22 USD |
| old.cawfee.club (server) | $3.50 USD |
| 000.testing.cawfee.club (server) | $3.50 USD |
| Total | $39.22 USD |
* Doubled the plan on 2023-01-08.
