Creating a Windows 10 USB boot medium on Fedora / Linux

I recently refurbished a used and old Acer Aspire E774 laptop as a donation for the Computertruhe e.V.. Of course, this also involves overwriting the hard disk with random data so that old data can no longer be reconstructed. Because “deleted” is not the same as “securely deleted”. I used the shred tool in a Fedora Live environment for secure deletion. However, it works just as well with any other Linux distribution.

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T-Shirts for my Mastodon instance metalhead.club

Two things are usually in short supply when you run a Mastodon instance: Funding and public attention. But both are important so that the instance can continue to operate and - if desired - achieve growth or reach. My goal with metalhead.club is to offer a professionally hosted platform for everyone who feels at home in the metal music genre. In order for such a theme-based instance to be viable and its users to benefit from it to the greatest extent, it must achieve a certain level of popularity.

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Switching Mastodon from Scaleway S3 to self-hosted Minio S3 media storage

Since the user flood of November 2022 I’ve been using Scaleway’s S3 storage for media file caching and storage of my metalhead.club Mastodon instance. It was easy to set up and has been working reliably for me. Back then the media cache size increased so much that my server’s internal storage could not keep up with the increasing demand. I didn’t want to shrink down the cache duration too much and therefore left it at 14 days.

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acme.sh fails with error 404 - ACME challenge not found (Nginx)

Recently I can into an issue with acme.sh / Let’s Encrypt and a failing ACME validation

Error 404 when running acme.sh --renew -d mydomain.tld

[Wed May  3 15:31:45 UTC 2023] Pending, The CA is processing your order, please just wait. (1/30)
[Wed May  3 15:31:49 UTC 2023] mydomain.tld:Verify error:<ipaddress> Invalid response from https://mydomain.tld/.well-known/acme-challenge/5GmSwd0P0ukTtX302yHHhAuZMCEDJx7MmAaBBoPIKtk: 404
[Wed May  3 15:31:49 UTC 2023] Please add '--debug' or '--log' to check more details.
[Wed May  3 15:31:49 UTC 2023] See: https://github.com/acmesh-official/acme.sh/wiki/How-to-debug-acme.sh

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Mastodon: Adding S3 based cloud storage to your instance

My Mastodon instance metalhead.club exists since summer 2016 and seen several waves of new users - but never as many new users as in early November 2022. This has not only led to heavy CPU work on the servers (see my post about scaling up Mastodon’s Sidekiq Workers), but also to greater load on storage space. Mastodon uses a media cache that not only stores copies of preview images for posts containing links - but also copies of all media files that the server knows of. Before the user wave of late 2020 metalhead.club’s media cache was about 350 GB in size with a cache retention time of 60 days. Quickly the numbers escalated and after a few days we were already at 400 GB - and after about 3 weeks we had more than 550 GB of cached media files. Not with 60 days retention time - but with 30 only.

Despite I added hundreds of GB of new storage space, the cache showed no signs of shrinking in the near future, so decided to offload the storage to an S3 storage provider. The local disks would have been full a few days later.

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