New direction for phereo.com

[bo3b]

Greetings, I'm Bo3b Johnson and am currently working on bringing phereo.com up to date.

Phereo.com was scheduled to be turned off altogether in August of last year, as it was running on old AWS instances that were being discontinued. I worked with the owners of phereo to transfer ownership and responsibilities, so that we could potentially keep phereo.com live.

It's undergoing a lot of change right now, and will be periodically broken, but I think we have a path to keeping it live.


If you happen to see this message, please let me know at <phereo@bo3b.net>

Thanks,
bo3b

[bo3b]

Also worth posting here I think. If anyone happens to see this, please try posting and I can answer questions here.

I believe I've resolved the last couple of problems for the forums, so anyone who already has a valid login should be able to post. I should be able to keep the information working.

No new users can register, that is disabled for now, because the spammers and griefers ruin it.


If you have a phereo.com login, you can use your username from there to log in here. That's why my account was named 5b360d5f888428cd3c000000, but you can edit your name in your phereo.com account page, and have it work here.

-bo3b

[bo3b]

I'll try to add updates here as they make sense. Please keep in mind this is all work-in-progress, and I've no idea where we are headed, outside of keeping phereo online as an archive. These updates will be sporadic.

Is it dead?
Not today. Because of contacts with NVidia, I was able to get in touch with prior owners of the site, and convinced them to give it away for free. Huge, huge thank you to the phereo staff for making this possible.

I'm currently the admin/owner, because I'm the one on the hook for hosting costs now. However, we've got a starting phereo foundation on github, as a way to hopefully make it a non-profit foundation that has some longevity. Anyone with coding skill and motivation is welcome to help us maintain and improve the site. Hosting costs are the biggest risk to longevity right now, and the reason phereo was willing to pass it along. I'm willing to bear the costs for now, but probably not forever.

Lost images:
JackDesBwa worked out why we had the big loss of images 4 years ago. Anything being uploaded during that time was stuck in an upload queue, because of a broken lock file on the server, that locked out any further uploads to the S3 storage location. This is not a bug per-se, and most likely answer was a hardware glitch, as the server was reporting HD failure. Jack has fixed that design flaw to make it more robust in case we start uploading again.

State of the lost images? Irretrievably lost we believe. There was a mechanism to clean up the queue to prevent disk full errors, so anything not uploaded for 7 days would be automatically deleted. So all these files were deleted. That means they are still on the disk image though. Using forensic tools I can see that a lot of them still exist on deleted HD sectors, but there is no obvious connection to where they would upload, which account. So a random set of images can in principle be restored, but this seems not worth the effort.

If anyone has forensic/recovery skills, we can provide the backup disk image for experimentation and possible recovery. It's painful to lose all those uploads.

Uploading images:
Currently broken with no possible ETA. The old uploader used the Flash browser plug-in, which is long since dead and gone. In order to re-enable uploads, we would need to build some new mechanism/UI/plugin. Not impossible, but non-trivial amount of work. JackDesBwa has done some excellent work understanding the back end for uploads, and has fixed the back end to allow uploads from code. There is no good way to use this outside of tools, but is a key part of possible future use, and good progress.

As the site admin, I want to be clear that I'm not sure I want to allow uploads in the future. I'm not opposed, but if it's open to the public, someone needs to manage it, because the griefers and spammers will invevitably arrive to destroy it. I'm not willing to spend time managing spam and abuse, so this is low priority for me. If someone is willing to sign up for this thankless job, please let us know.

Server stability:
I'm doing a lot of back end work and experimentation to bring the servers up to date, so you can expect the server to be broken periodically. I make efforts to be sure it's up whenever I can, but it can break at any time, as there is no one that knows how it all works. Servers are running Debian 6... which is a real challenge today. We are moving them to Docker based serving as a way to avoid having to rewrite everything.

You will see some improvements as we move things around and figure out better ways to run the server. For example, all pages are now working properly with https, and should no longer show insecure warnings. The certs are automatically updated via certbot, so we should no longer have https problems. The current setup is partly on modern servers, which are cheaper and faster, so the performance of the site should be fairly good. These forums are newly moved to a docker instance, and I was able to move all prior data, and reconnect logins. I think this should be stable, but cannot be certain yet.

As I move servers around and fix things for more modern hardware and try to drive down costs, you can expect that things will break and possibly lose some info, including posts here. I'll make efforts to avoid data loss, but it's not the highest priority until we get to a stable state.


Please be patient with us, this is all part-time effort. But please do comment or get in touch via email. Knowing that people use it and their preferences can help inform decisions on the future of the site.

Thanks,
-bo3b johnson <phereo@bo3b.net>