FOSS Galaxy

Phew, it’s been a busy year or so! I thought I’d make an update post telling people what we’ve been up to.

Chat System Updates

Matrix Space

Our Matrix server has been upgraded consistantly since it was created. This year, the resources allocated to it have been increased to ensure that everything runs smoothly. We’ve set up a Matrix Space on the server, which provides easy access to all the main rooms we are running.

Speaking of which, I’ve been posting announcements to the announcements channel as things have happened. So if you want up-to-date information, that’s probably the best place to check.

Jitsi

Matrix peer to peer voice chat has also been improving. There are bridges to Facebook Messenger and Telegram on the server. We’ve also got a Jitsi instance which is integrated into Matrix. It’s hosted in the UK and should (hopefully) have better performance than the main instance.

We’ve made a handful of contributions upstream to the docker-matrix-ansible-deploy repo, which is the tool we use to host our Matrix server.

Freenode Bridge

Like many communities, we were affected by the Freenode incident. This was quite hard-hitting for us. The group had a major presence on Freenode, and most of us spent decades there. The network no longer exists the same way it used to, and we don’t bridge it to matrix anymore. We don’t actively maintain a presence on the network.

Liberachat

Many of the Freenode devs have moved to Liberachat and many of the FOSS communities that used to exist on Freenode. We registered on the network and bridge many of our Matrix rooms to the #fossgalaxy– namespace. We’re also running our own bridge to the network (we set it up before the main bridge existed).

Errbot

Errbot plugins have been updated, and there is now a Matrix backend, allowing the bot to join us on Matrix and IRC. The bot hangs out with us on the main channel and its own dedicated testing channel, Bot Zoo.

Services Updates

There have been many changes to some of the services. Our core services continue to work as expected, and our Gitlab server (originally set up in 2016!) continues to be updated monthly when new feature releases are announced.

Gitlab Runners

The GitLab runner, build01, on the older of the two dedicated servers, has been decomissioned. It was constantly running out of space, had strange networking issues, and got a little long in the tooth. It will be recommissioned with a larger disk and a more modern OS.

The second builder, build02, has been given more disk space and has been updated to run on a newer OS (CentOS 8). It’s picking up the load and has been performing well.

Hedgedoc

Our markdown service, Hedgedoc, has been updated and had the permissions widened to allow guest contributors. A logged-in user can create a node and mark it as editable to anyone with the link in the permissions dropdown. Hedgedoc is the same software we used to run (CodiMD) but went through a rebrand.

We’ve been keeping an eye on development and look forward to seeing where Version 2.0 takes them!

New Infrastructure

The infrastructure on the newer of the two dedicated servers has been reworked. There is now a VM acting as a gateway between the other VMs and the outside world, providing HTTP proxying, DNS services, reverse proxy and a Wireguard endpoint. This helps with the ongoing effort to provide better systems monitoring, and let us know with things are not working as we’d expect.

The use of a caching proxy and a local DNS provider (doing DNSSEC validation) not only helps enhance security but should also help speed up DNS queries for DNS-heavy services like Matrix.

New hosts are running Alma Linux 8, a change from the previous OS of CentOS. It’s still largely the same, with the same setup process and tooling that we’re used to. The new infrastructure also includes an updated version of our identity provider, FreeIPA.