Just so I can finally clear the announcement off of #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon - We've been running without the Cloudflare Caching / proxy service since November 2025 now and other than the odd hiccup behind the scenes (Which CF wouldn't have helped with anyway) it's been really stable and from the folks that have provided feedback on the performance of the sites, both in the UK (Where we host the sites) and internationally the performance has been noticeably better.

We'll continue to monitor the global performance of the site, we continuously monitor latency and response times from various global endpoints and if it looks like we need to enable some sort of cache / CDN beyond what we now have in place we will re- visit it in the future. The change to remove CF proxying is going to remain permanent and now be "Normal" instead of the response to their global outage last year.

We're adding mastodon.cloud to our #Fediblock list due to the instance seemingly being abandoned with open signups and zero moderation. The burden of us suspending accounts locally is not practical when the instance is out of date and not being maintained.

It's been flagged since August last year - https://social.growyourown.services/@FediTips/115027342813989021 so I don't see it likely that anything is suddenly going to change.

#MastodonAppUK #Universeodon #FediMedi #MastoAdmin

Apologies for the blip there impacting a wide range of the sites we run ( #MastodonAppUK / #Universeodon / #FediMedi and for #MastoAdmin The Universeodon relay).

It looks like the NIC in one of our app servers had some sort of weird failure which prevented traffic on one of the two interfaces and due to it being setup in aggregation and not failover it caused a total outage of that server and all the VM's and CT's running on it.

We have also identified some issues with our secondary HAProxy instance which we need to get to the bottom of as things did not fail over as expected (Even though we know we haven't got full HA operational yet across all services because storage and RAM prices are through the roof and we need to add a third server for that).

Apologies again, we should be back to normal for now.

I've just pushed a minor change to our infrastructure configuration for #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon - I'm hoping this should fix some of the weird issues we've seen around IPv6 and it does mean that if our primary HAproxy server does go down for any reason the secondary server will take on the IPv6 connectivity as well.

I do need to look and see if I can do something smart to cover some IPv6 monitoring as right now IPv6 can silently fail and the site will still show as fully healthy.

Just as a bit of notice for #MastodonAppUk and #Universeodon folks

There will be an outage later this evening to facilitate the work I need to do here at the dc. Hoping it won't take too long and I'll let folks know when I have an idea on time.

I'm just waiting now for a dc staff member to let me through the front gate as it's a weekend so nobody's normally here 😂

It looks like I'm going to need to drive up to the DC now because I can't reasonably apply my fix remotely without risking breaking everything and having to go up there anyway.

For folks here on #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon if you'd like to chip in to support my growing coffee addiction with the nonsense that is servers and kit breaking I would always appreciate it.

One Off / Monthly on Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/mastodonappuk

And monthly support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/universeodon

The support is really appreciated and allows me to continue investing in the hardware and resources required to keep the sites online and with the continued goal now of removing dependencies on external parties.

It looks like the connectivity issues between #Universeodon and #MastodonAppUK are at least in part due to SideKiq and IPv6.

I've disabled IPv6 on SideKiq for the time being to at least let me try and get things back operational.

For now though it's very much past my bedtime and I need sleep!

We're having some major issues this evening across #MastodonAppUK and #Universeodon due to connectivity issues with our primary gateway router at our data center.

I'm waiting on some network monitoring info from our ISP but I'm starting to suspect this may be some sort of attack as I can't think of any other reason our router would be seemingly crashing regularly.

It seems as if the device comes online for a few seconds and then drops back off the internet.

Thankfully it doesn't seem to be actively impacting the sites themselves but our content processing is currently almost entirely offline due to issues with outbound connectivity.