Why?

One of my users, namely kikuchiyo, approached me with his idea to determine the distribution of users in his MUC room. The given hypothesis was, that the user count peaks during the weekend. As my general monitoring does not track the user count per room I was fairly interested in the data. Unfortunately ejabberd is not able to export these statistics, thus some custom steps were required.

data aggregation take 1

The first kind of rough data collection was done through a small bash script appending the collected data points to a CSV file. Due to the script using the sleep command I wasn’t counting on it being highly time wise precise.

I was notified, that currently there are accounts pretending to be staff accounts to the magicbroccoli.de XMPP service.

Please be cautious about anyone pretending to be a staff member and never give your password, or any personal information for that matter, to anyone.

If a situation requires staff intervention feel free to contact me, or any potential future staff member, via any one of the listed contact addresses linked on the about page. In the case of someone joining the staff team, a page with their contact details will be added to the mentioned about page.

Server maintenance announcement

The latest addition to critical CPU bugs, zombieload, has the ability to steal sensitive data, due to this a server maintenance is necessary.

The expected time period is estimated to 30.07.2019 8:00 - 10:00 CEST and will approximately last for up to 1 hour. All services will restart after the maintenance is finished.

If there are questions and/or suggestions please email me with the subject zombieload: $details or join the Lobby ( XMPP: Join Lobby )

Server Maintenance Schedule Notice

Due to the Foreshadow bug and the resulting updates to the kernel a reboot is necessary. My host system is scheduled to reboot in the following time period:

11.09.2018 12:00 - 14:00 CEST

The downtime of the server is estimated to last approximately for 30 minutes. All services will automatically restart after the reboot. If services are not working right away I will try to fix them as quick as possible.
I hope that this early warning will help to mitigate issues with the approaching downtime.

basic idea

For a longer period of time I was looking for a Munin plugin to monitor the activity, especially the user activity on my cloud instance. There are some plugins out there, but most of them depend on externally querying the database.
With the External API and the server info dashboard Nextcloud itself presents an endpoint to gather data from. This way the database action is handled by the cloud and I can just grab the data from the endpoint.

General Data Protection Regulation ( GDPR )

The day has finally come. The new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has become reality. With this new law every user has the right to know what data a service is storing. This post tries to clear up the situation what that means and what actually changed.

privacy policy

The new privacy policy describes which user data gets processed and/or stored on my servers. In addition to that the storage duration is listed in detail.

Prosody + Let’s Encrypt certificates

As of right now Prosody is not able to update a live certificate while running. For the complete update it is necessary to restart Prosody, which is inconvenient.
With the telnet console however, it is possible to reload the config such that a changed certificate is updated correctly. The biggest problem lies in reloading all possible locations the “old” certificate is still active in. I use the Prosody Telnet console to invoke a reload, due to the fact that prosodyctl reload is not actually reloading the modules just the config.
For this matter I hacked together a little bash script, which together with the Let’sEncrypt’s certbot and the default letsencrypt cli is used to import and update the Prosody certificate without a need to restart the instance.