L.J. but extra nerdy @nerd@writeout.ink

Dry run shows 932 accounts being culled, so... I guess it's worth it? Not entirely sure if it'll get rid of the cached avatars, but I'd been meaning to run this cleanup job anyway.

Doing a dry run of tootctl accounts cull and it's just passed 1,000 of 74,818. Probably a good time to step away.

Okay I think I'll run a cleanup of inactive/deleted remote accounts first, that's quite a few media files there and I don't want to transmit unnecessary files.

On the theory that the upload 500 error is because the media directories aren't synced with the bucket, I'm doing a dry run of the sync and wow... the sheer number of cached avatars & headers from remote servers is... concerning? It was nothing but avatar caches for a few minutes now, and it's moved on to headers just now. The lack of any user-level mechanism for cleaning these files up has been pointed out as a problem, I believe.

Okay I got the b2 cli working on the server and the account is properly authenticated, so I know the id and secret key are correct... so I can't figure out why I'm getting the 500 error, hmm.

Actually, let's see what happens if I upload a new piece of media... Oh okay, a 500 error, that's not good probably.

There's official Mastodon documentation on setting up an nginx object storage proxy, too! https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/optional/object-storage-proxy/ No doubt the other config I found is based a lot on it. I'll compare the two and try to get to the best settings 🤞

I installed MinIO and got it running, but turns out MinIO no longer has a gateway function and B2 is now S3 compatible anyway?? Okayyy.... going to try it directly over the coming days then, with the main headache now being that I have to set up the host myself on nginx. Fortunately there's a pretty helpful-looking guide. https://thomas-leister.de/en/mastodon-s3-media-storage/

Looks like these were the instructions I needed on Debian: https://min.io/docs/minio/linux/operations/install-deploy-manage/deploy-minio-single-node-single-drive.html

Installation seems to be successful, the systemd service file was created, and I created the group & user. I'm not foolhardy enough to self-host object storage and only plan to use MinIO as a router to B2, per the gist seen here, https://gist.github.com/fwenzel/84a6f2f6f34d28d6693d8751f23819e2 so I'm guessing I just need an environment, an empty mount, and get the service up so I can hook it up to the B2 bucket and then hook up Mastodon to MinIO.

Very timely too, because I have somehow Failed At Crontab and have had to delete media caches manually.* Today I logged into terminal JUST before we had another overflowing disk & attending crash situation, at 34 GB used out of 38 GB.

Also once the disk situation is better I'm looking forward to trying out more apps, like maybe a blog? Who knows!

* I'm more used to systemd timers but this server isn't set up to use systemd with the --user switch which would have been the cleanest solution, and some digging convinced me setting up user-level systemd jobs would be more trouble than it's worth especially since we're moving to objective storage anyway. Since periodic media purges will still be needed after the move I'll figure out crontab at more leisure afterward.