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🎉 Today marks 4 years of etke.cc! 🎉

🎉 Today marks 4 years of etke.cc! 🎉

The etke.cc managed Matrix hosting service was launched on the 12th of February 2021 and has turned 4 years old today!

Below is an overview of improvements that have happened over the last year.

Component changes

In the past year, we have launched a smaller number of components compared to last year. Most of our effort was spent on improving existing components, keeping up with upstream bridge replacements and polishing our service.

These components can be installed on existing servers upon request through our contact page.

  • ✨ Addition: ($3/mo) maubot - a plugin-based Matrix bot system offering a wide range of plugins
  • 🚀 Replacement/Upgrade: (+$3/mo) baibot - a Large-Language-Model (LLM) bot developed by us as a replacement for our old ChatGPT bot offering. You can use it to communicate with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and various other LLM providers.
  • 🔄 Replacement: the old mautrix-facebook bridge was superseded by the new mautrix-meta bridge for bridging to Messenger. See our docs here.
  • 🔄 Replacement: the old mautrix-instagram bridge was superseded by the new mautrix-meta bridge for bridging to Instagram. See our docs here.
  • 🔄 Replacement: mx-puppet-discord was removed, in favor of the better mautrix-discord bridge we’ve been offering already
  • 🔄 Replacement: mx-puppet-slack was removed, in favor of the better mautrix-slack bridge we’ve been offering already
  • 🔄 Replacement: appservice-webhooks was removed, in favor of the better Hookshot bridge we’ve been offering already
  • 🔄 Replacement: wireguard+dnsmasq was removed, in favor of the better Firezone VPN solution we’ve been offering already
  • 🗑️ Removal: The following components were removed: mx-puppet-steam, mx-puppet-groupme, dimension. We removed them because they were not maintained upstream. Unfortunately, there’s no alternative right now.
  • ✨ Addition: (+$1/mo) [previously-offered and making a comeback] the LanguageTool proofreading software, now with optional n-grams support
  • ✨ Addition: (+$5/mo) [brand new] the Funkwhale decentralized audio hosting platform
  • ✨ Addition: (+$5/mo) [brand new] the PeerTube decentralized video hosting platform
  • ☁️ Upgrade: (free) S3 Object Storage support was added to GoToSocial to make local disk space less of a limiting factor when scaling up
  • 🔄 Replacement: We’ve replaced the Redis implementation twice, first with KeyDB and then with Valkey (which established itself as the leading and more compatible Redis implementation). Redis is an internal dependency component and only enabled on servers that need it.

Other changes

  • ✨ Addition: A new monitoring service was created to monitor the health of each server and alert customers when troubles occur.
  • ✨ Addition: Our new demo service allows new and existing customers to test various components and features before ordering a Matrix server.
  • ✨ Addition: A new hosted version of the synapse-admin software is now available at admin.etke.cc. We still install synapse-admin to to each customer’s server as well, but the hosted version is a more bleeding-edge alternative that contains yet-unreleased features.
  • ✨ Addition: synapse-admin provides exclusive features to etke.cc customers, which connect synapse-admin with etke.cc’s monitoring system and scheduler bot.
  • 🚀 Upgrade: HTTP/3 support was added an enabled by default to all Matrix and non-Matrix services
  • 🚀 Upgrade: Our private Docker registry now supports caching and authentication via docker-registry-proxy
  • 📈 Upgrade: Thanks to our new monitoring service, some customers (those packing too many services on a small VPS) became aware of high RAM utilization. As a result we’ve adjusted database tuning to lower RAM cap and made SWAP more aggressive.
  • 📨 Upgrade: Overdue payments alerts are now delivered both to Matrix and email, ensuring important notifications are not missed.
  • 📨 Upgrade: DKIM support was added to the mailing service (exim-relay) used by all components, to improve email deliverability when the Matrix server sends outgoing emails. Last year, we added DKIM support to the Postmoogle email bridge so this is a continuation of that effort.
  • 🆘 Upgrade: We’ve migrated our customer support system from Matrix (powered by Honoroit and Postmoogle) to Freescout (self-hosted via our own mash-playbook). Using a dedicated customer support system has proven to be more manageable compared to dealing with chat threads in Matrix.
  • 🆘 Upgrade: New orders are now followed by an Order Status page that simplifies the completion process. It contains instructions for next steps regarding DNS settings and other configuration requirements.
  • 🆘 Upgrade: The scheduler bot now supports a new price command, which provides an overview of server costs with detailed breakdown by components
  • 🧑 Upgrade: We have finally added an About page to our website. Thankfully, it took us less than 4 years to get to it.

Free-software work

We’ve continued our work on the free-software (AGPLv3) Ansible mega-playbook - mash-playbook, which has grown to include 110+ components.

As part of our work over the past year, we have also developed and released as free-software (AGPLv3) the following new tools:

We’ve also done a lot more. Keep an eye on our GitHub for more.

Numbers!

  • 🏗️ We’ve installed 700+ Matrix servers in total, out of which 250 new ones.
  • 🔄 Pushed 391 updates and enhancements to the automation framework used as the service core (this does not count the number of updates to the components and upstream projects themselves).
  • 📢 Posted 56 updates in the announcements room, so you’re always up-to-date with what we’re working on.

For those interested in previous etke.cc birthday posts:

Source

Stable Updates Published

Stable Updates Published

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Stable Updates Published

Stable Updates Published

Service Updates: Removing Sliding Sync Proxy

Previously we’ve announced Sliding Sync Proxy deprecation, and with this update, it will be disabled completely.

Starting from Synapse 1.114, Sliding Sync is supported natively by Synapse in the form of Simplified Sliding Sync. We’ve waited enough time before disabling Sliding Sync Proxy to allow all your end-users to update their client apps and avoid interruptions.

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Stable Updates Published

Stable Updates Published

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Stable Updates Published

Stable Updates Published

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Stable Updates Published

Stable Updates Published

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Stable Updates Published

Stable Updates Published

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Stable Updates Published

Stable Updates Published

Component Updates: Synapse Admin Got Server Notifications

There are different kinds of server notifications, like monitoring reports, components alerts, overdue payments notices, and update notices. We attempt to make them less annoying, but still keep you aware about them. Starting with this update, Synapse Admin will show all such notifications directly in the UI, so even with broken federation you will notice that something is wrong

Source

Stable Updates Published

Stable Updates Published

Reminder: Authenticated Media Enabled by Default

Starting from November 28, your Synapse homeserver requires authentication for newly uploaded media files. While most Matrix ecosystem components (clients, bots, etc.) should support this feature, some software may lack compatibility.

Due to the critical security benefits of this change, we strongly discourage disabling it. If you develop your own Matrix app, service, or tool, please consider implementing authenticated media support as soon as possible.

Reminder: Synapse Admin Path Changed

The Synapse Admin path changed from https://matrix.your-server.com/synapse-admin to https://matrix.your-server.com/admin (that change was initially announced on November 21, and then again, but we still get support requests about it)

Source

Stable Updates Published

Stable Updates Published

Component Updates: Synapse Admin Got Server Status Page

Starting with this update, you could always check the status of your server using Synapse Admin. Apart from the components’ health, it shows if there is a process (like maintenance) running currently.

Service Updates: Monitoring Changes

As it was announced within the last update, systemd units monitoring has been enabled.

You may see failed systemd units (components) in the monitoring reports (on-demand using Synapse Admin or Scheduler; automatically via Email and Matrix reports) starting from this week

Reminder: Synapse Admin Path Changed

The Synapse Admin path changed from https://matrix.your-server.com/synapse-admin to https://matrix.your-server.com/admin (that change was initially announced on November 21, and then again, but we still get support requests about it)

Reminder: Customer Support Contacts Changed

Some time ago, we announced changes to Customer Support with its migration to the new system and email address, and want to remind you that the up-to-date contact methods could be found on the etke.cc/contacts page. The old contact methods (old email addresses, matrix and telegram contacts) are still working currently, but that may change in the future, so we suggest revisiting the contacts page to ensure you have up-to-date information.

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