Matteo Panella

@[email protected]
107 Followers
96 Following
7 Posts
Master of the Mystic Arts (ops and infrastructure automation) at $REDACTED. Opinions, rants et al. are my own.
Mehttps://matteo.panella.io
Also mehttps://github.com/rfc1459
Matteo PanellaAug 1, 2023

Today's terrible take about instance federation: "Fediverse should transition to a whitelist-based federation approach". Great, so admins should be in charge of who the hell I'm allowed to interact with - and even if I were to spin up my own instance I'd still have to convince other admins to let me federate with them.

Sorry, but this is where I draw the line: I'm too old for "IRC channel wars 2.0", I had enough with them in 2012, I'm sure as hell not going to deal with them in 2023.

Consider this account effectively frozen until things improve in the Fediverse at large, but I really don't think they will.

Show threadMatteo PanellaJul 2, 2023

@ariadne IIRC they now have a heavily discounted offering for some research institutions, but when I asked my former colleagues a few years ago they told me they were still running CentOS on the main batch farm because putting up with Satellite, subscription-manager et. al was a royal pain in the ass.

Also, the discount only covered a few hundred subscriptions out of thousands of systems, so... yeah.

Show threadMatteo PanellaJul 2, 2023

@ariadne There's a big big elephant in the room nobody (especially Red Hat) is talking about: a lot of public research institutions run EL derivatives, licensing costs for RHEL would be higher than their IT budget (sometimes even higher than their *entire* budget) and essentially gobble up public funds that would be better spent for actual research.

Previously I worked in such an institution: we had ~1500 dual-socket physical systems and ~3000 virtual machines in one datacenter alone, all running CentOS or Scientific Linux. One day, Red Hat asked to meet us and tried to sell RHEL with the usual bullshit about CentOS/SL being essentially "stolen work", when we asked if they had discounted licenses for non-profit research institutions they replied with the publicly listed prices for RHEL. Given our numbers, that would have put yearly operating costs in the range of tens of millions of euros just to bless our machines with a license.

We laughed hard and told them they were wasting their time if they thought we'd give them that much money for basically nothing in return ("no, we don't support that" was their recurring answer when we told them what kind of workload was running on those systems).

Matteo PanellaDec 30, 2022

Someone is building a "global fediverse post indexer" that:

* scrapes the public APIs so it can't be blocked via defederation
* uses a bunch of dynamic IPs so it can't be banned at network level (hilariously, the author redacted this part and forgot that the edit history can be viewed by anyone)
* can be blocked by server admins via robots.txt, but they're planning to publish which instances are opting out (right now this is "open for debate")
* can be blocked by users by disabling indexing in the profile settings (!) or adding a specific hashtag to their bio (!!)

There's ZERO mention of opt-in, a lot of pushback against anyone who dares calling this thing a scraper ("we're using public APIs, so we're not a scraper") and the inevitable "we got complaints only from people who have something to hide".

With this attitude, I wonder how they're going to respond to the first GDPR compliant they're inevitably going to receive, it'll be fun 🍿

Matteo PanellaNov 13, 2022

Belated #introduction.

Hello, I'm Matteo. I'm an operations/infrastructure automation engineer for a major Italian financial institution, dad, and proud human servant of a senior ginger cat. During my free time, I usually dabble with retrocomputing, especially emulated DEC and IBM mainframe systems from the '60-'70s.

Many many thanks to @ariadne and the other people behind Treehouse for putting up with the hassle of running a semi-public Mastodon instance.