Diasp.in XMPP migrated to Durare.org's server

Hello everyone,

Happy New year and a happy new server to diasp.in.

I am happy to announce that diasp.in now shares home with durare.org. We have successfully migrated diasp.in XMMP service to the durare.org server. The new server at Hetzner is around 1/3rd the cost of Infomaniak’s with the same specs. Since Diaspora service has been shut, it seemed logical to migrate the XMPP service to durare.org server to save costs, resources, and maintenance efforts.

The process took longer than expected due to some unexpected surprises. I had already tested the migration once on a temporary test server, so I was prepared. Or so I thought.

First surprise or rather shock, came when I was not able to copy files from old server to new server. Troubleshooting and trying various options from web searches gave no results. Ravi and Praveen had to jump in to help me. As we were struggling with this simple task, I thought of trying it from the test server, and it worked!

Next, to update the DNS settings, I sent a merge request to Gitlab repository which, failed. It always happened before also. Someone had to manually run the pipeline every time. Praveen gave me access, and I managed to somehow run the pipeline. Again, or so I thought. The process did not actually finish, and while figuring out problem, I stumbled upon a small icon in which I had to click another option to finally run the last stage of pipeline running. Finally, when it ran, I finished the rest of the changes, and the diasp.in XMPP service was now up on new server.

Then came the next error. Prosody was running, but I could not log in with my diasp.in id. After checking log, I realized that I had to change the permissions of the files copied from old server. After doing that I was able to log in without any problems. Logs and endpoints were fine too. Like never ending small tasks, next one was to migrate the website, which I had no clue of how to do. It was 3 am by then, and since the service was up, I felt less guilty of going to sleep. I thought I finally did it. Or had I?

After waking up, while checking everything again, I noticed something strange. The HTTP endpoints were not working. And, this also caused file sharing to fail. New surprise, new panic. Again, after various troubleshooting steps and trying making sense of logs, I realised that Caddy was failing every minute or so. Its CPU and RAM usage was skyrocketing with queries related to diasp.in and was getting crashed. Then, Perry came to rescue, hacked Caddy, and got website up too. Phew.

I was afraid that the users and maintainers of diasp.in would be angry on me for taking so long and breaking the service, but thanks to understanding and patience of everyone, nothing such happened. Thanks to Ravi, Perry, and especially to Praveen, and the support team of Prosody who have been patiently guiding and teaching me new things these past few months. Also, thanks to our community who have been kindly helping me with various things.

I shared all this to emphasize that if you are interested to volunteer and have no prior knowledge on these topics, then please do not hesitate. Like me, you too can learn new things and at your own pace. It took much more time than I had expected to learn and do these things, but no one ever pushed or pressured me to do it quickly. And in case of doubts, just ask.

You can start by tackling any tasks at our issues page. Do any of these tasks look interesting or challenging to you? Contact us to volunteer. Or, you can also help us by sponsoring the expenses with any amount you can through -

1. Donating at our Razorpay page with UPI, Cards, Net banking, and Wallets.

2. You can add credits to our Hetzner account by bank transfer. Just mention our Hetzner Customer ID - K0698488224 as a reference. Bank details -
   Deutsche Bank AG Nuremberg
   IBAN: DE92 7607 0012 0750 0077 00
   BIC: DEUTDEMM760

3. You can also donate at our Open Collective page.
   

Feel free to reach out to us for any queries.

Thank you for your time, support, and consideration.


(PS: Excuse me, like my migration process this long write-up also might have grammatical and spelling errors. I wanted to share it asap rather than trying to make it perfect, and not ever sharing)